Lauren Swift is a writer and editor based in Sacramento, California. Her poems, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in or are forthcoming with journals including Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Bennington Review, North American Review, Atlanta Review, The Pinch, The Rumpus, Birdcoat Quarterly, and The Shore. She was the recipient of Academy of American Poets Prizes in 2016 and 2019. Her manuscript, Berth, was a finalist for the 2022 Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize. She is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow.

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She holds an MFA from the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine, where she was awarded the 2020 Graduate Award for Excellence in Poetry and the 2019 Nora Folkenflik Award for Excellence in Poetry. She also earned an MA in English from the University of California, Davis, where she was awarded the 2016 Elliot Gilbert Prize for Poetry. 

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Her teaching has included university courses in composition and rhetoric, creative writing, and ESL, and she is currently working as a freelance writer and editor specializing in B2B content and marketing.

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