Hannah Ensor is a poet and essayist working around topics of pop culture, sports, queer television, and mass media.

Hannah’s first book of poetry is Love Dream With Television (Noemi Press, 2018). With Natalie Diaz they served as associate editor of Bodies Built for Game, an anthology of contemporary sports literature, and with Laura Wetherington and Jill Darling they co-wrote the collaborative poetry chapbook at the intersection of 3.

In 2019 they won the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Their writing has appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including the PEN Poetry Series, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Essay Daily, JUPITER88, and Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre. 

They are currently writing a poet’s novel about watching The L Word in Tucson, Arizona. To read an excerpt, selected by Amina Cain as runner-up for Quarterly West’s 2022 prose contest, click here. In her judge’s selection, Amina Cain wrote, “I chose this piece for its satisfying narrative voice and structure, its sense of expansiveness, not unlike the desert landscape in which it takes place, and its movement. ‘If You Can Never Love It Enough’ is witty and wise and I like the questions it asks about writing.”

Hannah teaches courses on contemporary poetry, creative writing, and contemporary sports literature in the University of Michigan’s Residential College and English Department. Until December 2017, they served as the Literary Director at the University of Arizona Poetry Center; they have also worked as an Assistant Professor (Fixed Term) of Creative Writing at Michigan State University, and at the University of Michigan as an instructor at the New England Literature Program (NELP) and as the manager of the Hopwood Awards Program.

Hannah is an editor of textsound.org, a contributing poetry editor for DIAGRAM, and has served as president of the board of directors of Casa Libre en la Solana. She has taken author portraits of 50+ poets and writers, appearing in venues such as Bookforum, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and in holdings of the LaVerne Harrell Clark Photographic Collection at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. From 2011-2014, she played drums with John Melillo as one half of the Tucson-based noise-pop band Algae & Tentacles.