Danusha Laméris was born in Massachusetts and raised in California. She earned BA in fine arts at University of California, Santa Cruz and studied at the Squaw Valley Writers Workshops and with the poet Ellen Bass. Her first book of poems, The Moons of August, was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award and she is the 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She lives in Santa Cruz where she teaches poetry independently and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.