Carmen Leigh Keates is a Brisbane poet. She earned a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the Queensland University of Technology before completing a Master of Philosophy (2010) in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland for her unpublished verse novella, 'Second-hand attack dog'. She later earned a PhD (2015) from the same institution. Her PhD thesis has been published as a book of lyric poems under the title Meteorites; it won the 2015 Whitmore Press manuscript prize. Her works appear in many anthologies and journals, including Best Australian poems 2013. She has been shortlisted for several awards including the 2011 Alec Bolton Prize for an unpublished manuscript. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Whitmore Press and Josephine Ulrick prizes.