Dana Elkun was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1973. She received a BA from Stanford University, studied West African literature and performance at the University of Ghana, and received an MFA from University of Washington. She has taught poetry at University of Washington, University of Arizona Poetry Center, and Naropa University, and to children in foster care and juvenile detention. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Bellingham Review, Margie, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. She lives in Boulder with her husband and newborn son.

Other poems by Dana Elkun in Verse Daily:

Books by Dana Elkun:

Other poems on the web by Dana Elkun:
"Poem #2: Prose poetry chain"
Three poems

About Black Box Theater as Abandoned Zoo:

"The poems in Dana Elkun's collection linger like memories around the fireplace of a great manor house. They invite themselves in, pour themselves drinks, and poke around the coat closet of your psyche. The book's logic is sly magic and sleight of hand; the words are made of 'fricative thousands' and strung 'on vines.' The combined effect is one of lush uneasiness, where comfort is like 'a nutshell around your heart.' Wherever we're going Elkun gets us there: 'headfirst / and full of grace.'"
—Catherine Wing

"Louis Armstrong on Bleeker Street, a turtle atop a totem pole, retrograde amnesia, a mirage between monks that never disappears. These are only a few of the many surprises that find their way, fittingly, into Black Box Theater as Abandoned Zoo. In Dana Elkun's skillfull hands, language regains its original plasticity, its wildness, its willingness to do the imagination's bidding, come what may. For readers eager to be released from the twin enclosures of narrative and logic, Elkun's marvelously crafted poems hold the key"
—John Brehm

"Perspective is everything in Dana Elkun's compact and musical poems. Each offers a lens refocused, or, as she writes in 'Epic,' a 'keyhole: a peep / with promise.' By revealing perception as something slippery, suspect, and mutable, Black Box Theater as Abandoned Zoo invites us to pivot, refocus, and see anew."
—Elizabeth Austen