Tara M. Stringfellow is a poet, novelist, and activist from Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of the novel Memphis (Dial Press, 2022), a Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club pick that was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Award. Her poetry collection Magic Enuff (Dial Press, 2024) is the winner of the Richard Wright Literary Award and the ALA Book Award, and is shortlisted for the 2025 Tennessee Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, The Washington Post, among other publications.

Northwestern University’s first MFA graduate in both fiction and poetry, she is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at Bowling Green State University and has taught creative writing at the undergraduate and graduate levels, specializing in poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms.

The author is fluent in Italian.

If she isn’t in Memphis, she’s in Italy. If she’s in Memphis, then she is on the porch swing with her hound dog, Huckleberry, listening to records and chatting with neighbors.