Born in Oahu, Hawaii, Babette Cieskowski has lived in South Florida, Kitzingen, Germany and Central Texas. She earned her MFA in Poetry from The Ohio State University, and she was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2020, 2024 & 2026. Her poems have appeared in Compose, the minnesota review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Zone 3, Frontier Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Juked, The Laurel Review, among others. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Secrets My Body Keeps (dancing girl press, 2022). 

"The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference."           

                                    ---Audre Lorde