Brandon Kilbourne

Brandon Kilbourne, currently living in Berlin, is a poet and biologist. A Cave Canem Fellow, his debut poetry collection “Natural History” (Graywolf Press 2025) was winner of the 2025 Cave Canem Prize and chosen by Smithsonian Magazine as one of the ten best science books of 2025, in addition to being a finalist for the PEN for the 2026 Open Book Award. He earned his PhD in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago and has worked more than twenty years at natural history museums in Denver, Chicago, and Berlin and has worked with collections and done fieldwork across the globe.