The dragonfly genus Celithemis consists of 7 to 8 species, several common and brightly colored, that are confined largely to eastern North America. Several species have been used in behavioral, ecological, and morphological studies, but their intrageneric phylogeny and their position within Libellulidae has never been satisfactorily resolved. In this paper I provide a partial phylogeny based on DNA sequenced data from the mitochondrial protein-coding gene, COI, and the D2 28s region of the nuclear rRNA gene. For the most part these confirm the early unpublished work of Kornell (2003), and they supplement that work by the addition of multiple individuals of several special that were problematic in the earlier study. The genus appears to be monophyletic, with at least one nested species group (including C. verna, C. amanda, C. martha, and C. eponina) receiving strong bootstrap support using either parsimony or maximum-likelihood criteria as well as high posterior probability in a Bayesian analysis. A second group, including C. elisa and C. fasciata, is recovered by parsimony but not by maximum-likelihood and Bayesian analysis.