Alyssa Marie Gaines is a poet, writer, art historian, and a recent graduate of Harvard University, where she studied Social Studies and History of Art and Architecture and received the Edward Eager Memorial Fund Prize for poetry in 2025. She is the 6th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, the first laureate from Indiana, with an interest in the political lives of beautiful things and the stories that make them matter. She is currently completing her debut poetry manuscript, Drift, and preparing for a fellowship at VCCA this fall.

Her newsletter, Quiet Parts — "you are now entering my studio" — is a running study of how art, feeling, and culture shape political life, written for a retired loudmouth's very niche corner of the internet. It's a community archiving Black beauty, with a monthly book club close-reading contemporary Black art.