Adam Clay is the author of To Make Room for the Sea (Milkweed Editions, 2020),  Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016), A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012), and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). A fifth book of poems, Circle Back, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2024. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Bennington Review, Georgia Review, Boston Review, jubilat, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Recently he received a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission.

He is editor of Mississippi Review and directs the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.