Elkins manuscript Blue Yodel was selected by judge Carl Phillips, who praised her work in a release.

Through her arresting use of persona, in particular, Ansel Elkins reminds us of the pivotal role of compassion in understanding others and more deeply and often more disturbingly our various inner selves, he said.

Razor-edged in their intelligence, southern gothic in their sensibility, these poems enter the strangenesses of others and return us to a world at once charged, changed, brutal, and luminous.

Her poem Blues for the Death of the Sun is online at Guernica.

August. The rivers are rising.

Like crows, the people of my town walk the streets, faces skyward Searching for light as for the face of a mother.

Somewhere in the blackening hills a peacock hollers his blue yodel.

Previous Yales Series of Younger Poets Prize winners include Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass.

Elkins is a recipient of several other awards, including the North American Review James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Fugue Poetry Prize, the DiscoveryBoston Review Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

She joined the L.A.

Times in 2010 as a staff writer in books with an emphasis on digital projects.

For six years, she served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle.

In her spare time, she ran a podcast interviewing authors called Pinkys Paperhaus.

She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a bachelors degree from the University of Southern California.

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Yale Younger Poets Winners