Brenda Yates grew up on military bases. After living in Tennessee, Delaware, Florida, Michigan, Massachusetts, Japan and Hawaii, she settled first in Boston, then Los Angeles. Her work appears in journals including Askew, Brain of Forgetting, Chaparral, Cider Press Review, Coe Review, DASH, Eclipse, Ilanot Review, Illuminations, In Posse Review, Kattywompus, Mississippi Review, Mixitini Matrix, Pearl, Princemere Journal, Sliver of Stone, Spillway, StepAway Magazine, and in Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach), City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry (University of Iowa Press), Manifest West (Western Press Books) and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee (Texas Review Press). A Pushcart nominee and winner of the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center Poetry Contest, she was also awarded a Patricia Bibby Memorial Prize and honorable mention in the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation Poetry Contest.