Raye Hendrix is a writer from Alabama. Raye’s debut full-length collection of poetry, What Good Is Heaven, was published in 2024 by Texas Review Press as the Alabama selection for their Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series. What Good Is Heaven is the winner of the 2024 Weatherford Award for Best Appalachian Poetry and was longlisted for the 2024 Julie Suk award (Jacar Press).

Raye is also the author of the chapbooks Every Journal is a Plague Journal (Bottlecap Press) and Fire Sermons (Ghost City Press). She is the winner of the Keene Prize for Literature (2019) and the Patricia Aakhus Award (Southern Indiana Review, 2018), and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has been featured in Poetry Daily, American Poetry Review, The Seventh Wave, Poet Lore, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. 

Raye earned their PhD from the University of Oregon, where they were awarded grants and fellowships for their work at the intersections of American Literature and Disability Studies. Raye also earned their BA and MA from Auburn University and their MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin, where they won the Michael Adams Thesis Prize in Poetry (selected by Robyn Schiff).

Raye is the editor of Dis/Connect: A Disability Literature Column (Anomalous Press) and Origin Story: A Poetry Interview Project, as well as a member of the Thunder and Lightning Poetry Collective, a platform dedicated to highlighting BIPOC and/or queer disabled poets. Raye lives in Tennessee and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing) at Berea College in Kentucky.