Serena Alagappan is a writer and editor based in New York City. She received her A.B. in comparative literature and creative writing from Princeton University. She then received an MSc in Social Anthropology and an MSt in World Literatures in English from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her first book, Love over Language: The Search for Partial Universals is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Her writing has appeared in The London Magazine, The Oprah Magazine, Scientific American, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. She edited poetry for the thirtieth annual Mays Anthology, and previously edited the Oxford Review of Books.

Sensitive to Temperature, her debut poetry pamphlet, received the 2022 New Poets Prize and was published by the Poetry Business under the Smith|Doorstop imprint on June 1, 2023. She has recently led workshop series with the Oxford Poetry Library and the Estuary Institute and currently works as a senior editor at Poets & Writers.