About

Tara Mesalik MacMahon is North American Review’s 2024 James Hearst Poetry Prize winner and a winner of the ONLY POEMS 2024 Poet of the Year Prize. Her first collection of poems, Barefoot Up the Mountain, won the 2020 Open Country Press Chapbook Contest. 

Tara holds a B.A. from Pomona College and an M.B.A. from Harvard University. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in North American Review, ONLY POEMS, Jabberwock Review, Nimrod International Journal, Poet Lore, Radar Poetry, Rhino, Empty Bowl Press, Red Hen Press’s “New Moons” anthology, among other literary journals and anthologies.

Additional honors and prizes include those from Jabberwock Review Editors’ Prize, Nimrod’s Award for New Writers, Frontier’s Industry Prize, Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, Beloit Poetry, Floating Bridge, Tomaž Šalamun Prize, Orison Books, and others. 

Tara and her brother Mark Ukra (a HarperCollins author) have co-authored best-selling and gold-award-winning Closet of Dreams, the debut title in their childrens’ chapter book series, The Adventures of Child and Gamma.

Tara resides on an island in the Salish Sea with her husband Paul and rescue dog Hector.

"You choose to be a novelist, but you're chosen to be a poet. This is a gift and it's a tremendous responsibility. You have to be willing to give something terribly intimate and secret of yourself to the world and not care, because you have to believe that what you have to say is important enough.”

— May Sarton