C. L. O'Dell was born in the Hudson Valley and received his MFA in poetry from Manhattanville College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Barrow Street and Blackbird, among others. He was a recent semi-finalist for the 92Y's Discovery Poetry Contest, the Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prize, and his poem “My Father Named the Trees” was selected by Dorianne Laux for the Best New Poets 2014 anthology. He is founder and editor of The Paris-American.

"under each slab of darkness,
an infant bit of light was still learning how to turn
​into nothing"

— from "While Lying on the Back of a Blue Whale"