Amelia Ada is a trans poet and essayist in Los Angeles.

She is the author of the book-length poem Hard and Glad, forthcoming from DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e) in 2026.

She has written poetry and prose about such things as the etymology of the word “thing,” her absent father who once stole a complete set of Audubon’s Birds of America, Mormonism, Virginia Woolf’s moths, freeways in Oakland, a fungus called poria incrassata that eats houses, Gertrude Stein (“I never say no, not in America”), and the pleasure of the text. She loves to review recent books of poetry.

Her writing has appeared widely.

She spends her days as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California, and is at work on a book of literary criticism about the form of attachment often called “love.”

She co-hosts the podcast You Shouldn’t Let Poets Lie To You.