Daniela Elza's sixth poetry collection Scar/city (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025) was shortlisted for the 2026 George Ryga Award for work showing outstanding social awareness, longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize, and is a finalist in the SCWES Book Awards for BC Authors.
Her debut essay collection Is This an Illness or an Accident? (Caitlin Press, 2025) delves into the conflicts and contradictions of what it means to belong, to work, and find home. It is also a finalist in the non-fiction category of the SCWES Book Awards for BC Authors.
Daniela's previous poetry books are the broken boat (2020), the weight of dew (2012), milk tooth bane bone (2013), the book of it (2011) & slow erosions (2020).
Daniela's work has won numerous contests, is published internationally, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology multiple times.
In 2011 Daniela earned her doctorate in Philosophy of Education from Simon Fraser University. Her thesis was nominated for the 2011 CAGS UMI Distinguished Dissertation Award Competition, and received the Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal, recognizing her dissertation for not only addressing the long standing epistemological split between the philosophic and poetic, but attempting to heal that very split.
Daniela is the recipient of the 2024 Colleen Thibaudeau Award for Outstanding Contribution to Poetry & the 2010 Pandora's Collective Citizenship Award.
When she is not writing or volunteering in her community she works as a creative writing instructor, editor & mentor on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver.