Destiny Hemphill is a ritual worker and poet, living on the unceded territory of the Eno-Occaneechi band of the Saponi Nation (Durham, NC). She writes in the name of mama-n-em, in the key of the Black spiritual “This World Is Not My Home,” on a planet calling in response “I am not the world’s home.” From reimagining matrilineal inheritances in her chapbook Oracle: a Cosmology to more speculative meditations on apocalypse, empire, and Black liberation in motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life, her work shapeshifts conceptually, thematically, and formally. Yet, the crimson thread running through her work is a practice that she calls Black occult poetics, which uses ancestral memory, divination, prayer, ritual, and mysticism as compositional strategies. And the silver thread humming is a devotion to mothering as a liberatory care practice that transgresses gender and biological function, as taught by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. With these threads, she aims to weave work that honors the communities enable her survival as a Southern Black queer, chronically ill person.

Hemphill is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and has received other fellowships for her poetry from Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, Callaloo, Tin House, Kenyon Review's Writers Workshop, and Torch Literary. She is a co-editor for Poetry as Spellcasting (North Atlantic Books 2023). Her  poetry collection motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life (Action Books, 2023) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Prize. Her work has also been featured in Poetry Magazine, Southern Cultures, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series. She served as an inaugural Poetry Coalition Fellow, a Kenan Visiting Writer in Poetry at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and an inaugural Tin House Reading Fellow.