Meredith Nnoka (they/she) is a Chicago-based poet, teacher, and prison abolitionist. They have a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, both in Africana studies. They teach poetry in carceral facilities and have received fellowships from Illinois Humanities, Lambda Literary, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Meredith’s writing explores the intersections of justice, feminism, and sexuality. Their poems have appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize, their first book, Les Portes, is forthcoming in 2026 from Autumn House Press.

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Praise for Les Portes

“Written from within a blessedly unfinished and particular life, Les Portes is a tender meditation on intimacy, survival, the violent ‘history available to repeat,’ and how we might, nonetheless, reach toward each other. Moving from the child’s doomed certainty of the gendered harm she will inherit, to the enclosing repetitions of queer domestic abuse, to the woman’s flight away into ‘the bright world again / carrying every year of [her] life in [her] hands,’ this searching debut allows us to witness a voice wrestling with form in order to come honestly into its own. I am grateful to this poet for her honesty, her opacity, her directness, her ambivalence, her arrival, not at closure, but at more openness to questions about how to desire a future absent of harm—after we ‘break apart, shatter, / melt down the very machinery’—while living on in a world, a self, so thoroughly shaped by it. That is, this is the kind of book I find myself reaching for these days, one that helps me to feel something new about how to live, as we all do, in the aftermath—the aftermath of our personal traumas and losses and leavings, the aftermath of the racist/heteropatriarchal order that gives them form.”

—Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of Dispatch

“Meredith Nnoka is a poet of daring ethical imagination. Through language at once elegant in syntax and jagged in emotional truth, Les Portes excavates ‘an unknown history of fire’ in order to move closer to ‘something like love.’ To understand harm, its origins, and how to address it, Nnoka is not satisfied to examine only the self or the immediate other; she must investigate whole family histories as well as the power structures built around race, gender, and queerness. But never does she forget the everyday scale at which intimate partner violence occurs—nor how a single illuminating image can push toward another life possibility. What an expansive and unforgettable debut.”

—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency