“The Daily Writer” Author Bios

Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta is an associate professor at the City University of New York-Bronx Community College. Her first book of poetry, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, is an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist and is forthcoming from Get Fresh Books in 2021. She is the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge, 2019), an anthology that features more than thirty Latinx contributors. Recent work can be found in Best American Poetry, The Baffler, Acentos Journal, Kweli Journal, Red Fez, Gathering of the Tribes Magazine, In Full Color, Paterson Literary Review, MiPoesias, Short Plays on Reproductive Freedom, and Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader. She is a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet and a Macondo Fellow.

Ellen Adams writes fiction, essays, and songs, with a particular interest in the unexpected doorways between kinship and estrangement. She is a Lambda Literary Fellow, Ploughshares Emerging Writer, and grantee of the Elizabeth George Foundation and Canada Council for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Southwest Review, Singapore Art Museum, and elsewhere, and is listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2019. She has been awarded residencies at Banff Centre, Hedgebrook, and Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Originally from Spokane, she splits her time between Seattle and Montreal.

Laurie Foos is author of six novels: Before Elvis There Was Nothing, Ex Utero, Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist, Twinship, Bingo Under the Crucifix, and Blue Girl. Her fiction career began when an editor at Coffeehouse Press pulled her manuscript from the slush pile. Her work as appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, The Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, Quarterly West, Solstice, and many other journals. Her awards include the Stanford Calderwood Fellowship and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and elsewhere. Her books have won San Diego Current’s Hot Tamale Award, Los Angeles Reader Top Ten Books of 1995, and Village Voice’s Notable Books. She teaches creative writing at Goddard College and Lesley University and lives on Long Island.

Yael Flusberg is author of the poetry chapbook The Last of My Village (Poetica Press, 2010) and leads Pen & Pose, a workshop series combining poetry and yoga, at writing festivals, public libraries, universities, hospices, community gardens, and yoga studios. The child of Holocaust survivors, her interest in epigenetics has led her to explore multiple creative and integrative healing modalities. She is a yoga therapist, Reiki healer, nonprofit consultant, and writing teacher. Her poems and essays have been broadcast on NPR and have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Split this Rock and in several anthologies, most recently Deep Beauty: Experiencing Wonder When the World Is on Fire.

liz gonzález is author of Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected (Los Nietos Press, 2018) and the poetry collection Beneath Bone (Manifest Press, 2000). Her writing recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poets & Writers, The International Literary Quarterly, Voices de la Luna, and the anthologies Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, San Bernardino Singing, and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California. Her awards include an Arts Council for Long Beach Professional Artist Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Artistic Grant, and a Hedgebrook residency. She founded Womxn’s Write Inn, a collective of womxn writers who meet regularly to write and workshop. She teaches creative writing at UCLA’s Extension Writers’ Program.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has worked in fields, factories, and waters. Books include a memoir, Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer; seven poetry books, The Year of the Rat, Dog Road Woman, Off-Season City Pipe, Blood Run, Burn, Streaming; and Look at This Blue (forthcoming); a play, Icicles; and several anthologies, Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, Ahani, Effigies, Effigies II and Effigies III. She is the founder of the Sandhill Crane Retreat and directs UCR Writers Week and Along the Chaparral: memorializing the enshrined at the University of California Riverside, where she teaches for Creative Writing and the School of Medicine.

Alden Jones was born in New York, raised in New Jersey, in lives in Boston and Provincetown. Her critical memoir, The Wanting Was a Wilderness, was published in 2020 by Fiction Advocate. She is also author of The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler’s Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia, which was a Top Ten Travel Book by Publishers Weekly and the Huffington Post, and the short story collection Unaccompanied Minors. Together, these two books won five book prizes. Her essays and stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including New York Magazine, Psychology Today, Agni, Iowa Review, and Best American Travel Writing. She is the cofounder of the Cuba Writers Program and teaches creative writing at Emerson College and Salve Regina University.

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is an American author, poet, songwriter, and performance artist. She currently hosts the podcast “Annie’s Story Cave” and the performance series on Zoom: “Tell Me a Story Annie—a City Lore Salon” offering engaging dialogue for people sheltering in place, especially those alone. Her books include: Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning and Stagelight; Pitch, Roll, Yaw (Guernica World Editions); L is for Lion: an italian bronx butch freedom memoir (SUNY Albany Press), a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, and Schistsong, (Bordighera Press). Lanzillotto has narrated her audiobooks for Audible.com. Her albums include “Never Argue With a Jackass,” and “Swampjuice: Yankee With a Southern Peasant Soul.”

Kenneth Massey is a prose writer, photographer, and visual artist in Zion, Illinois. He raised his two sons as a single father, beginning when they were two and four years old. A longtime special repairman at the Chrysler Corporation, he completed coursework in creative writing, radio, film and television at Northwestern University during his frequent layoffs. After retiring from the automotive industry, he earned a MFA from Bennington College and then taught writing for five years at the College of Lake County in Illinois and other institutions. He is currently a fulltime caregiver for his 92-year-old mother, as he continues to write, make art, restore vintage furniture, silence his internal censors, and feed his enormous curiosity about the arts and history. His most recent publication, the essay “Behind the Red Railing,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the journal Scoundrel Time.

Susanne Paola Antonetta is the author of six books of nonfiction, four books of poetry, one handbook/textbook, and a novel. Entangled Objects: A Novel in Quantum Parts, was just published by Slant Books and she has two forthcoming books of nonfiction: The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, out in February, and The Devil’s Castle, forthcoming in 2022 from Counterpoint. Her craft book Tell It Slant, co-written with Brenda Miller, is in its fourth edition. Her many awards include an American Book Award, New York Times Notable Book, Library Journal’s Best Science Book of the Year, and a Pushcart Prize. Her writing has been translated into Korean, Italian, and Dutch. She is also editor of the Bellingham Review and professor of English at Western Washington University.

Anastacia-Reneé is the author of four books of poetry. She is also an educator, interdisciplinary artist, TEDx Speaker, and podcaster. She was a 2020 Arc Fellow with 4Culture and the 2020 Jack Straw Writing Program Curator. She is the recipient of the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award for Washington Artists (2018), Seattle Civic Poet (2017-2019), and Poet-in-Residence at Hugo House (2015-2017). Reneé has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, and Ragdale. Her poems and essays have been anthologized in Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden, and Seismic: Seattle City of Literature. In February 2021 her one-woman exhibition “(Don’t be Absurd) Alice in Parts” will debut at the Frye Museum in her home city of Seattle.

Juan Carlos Reyes is author of the novella A Summer’s Lynching (Quarterly West) and the fiction chapbook Elements of a Bystander (Arcadia Press). His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Florida Review, Waccamaw Journal, and Hawai’i Review, among other journals. He has won the Gar LaSalle Artist Trust Storyteller Award, a PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellowship, and a Jack Straw Writers Fellowship. He has taught poetry and fiction with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project and is a board member of the Seattle City of Literature. He previously taught writing at the University of Alabama and is now assistant professor of creative writing at Seattle University. He also serves as the chief editor of Big Fiction.

Roland Rugero grew up in Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania in a family where reading was a favorite pastime. His novels include Les Oniriques and Baho!, the first Burundian novel to be translated and published in English, by Phoneme Media. Rugero has held residencies at La Rochelle and at the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program. In addition to his work as a journalist and writer, in 2011 he wrote and directed Les pieds et les mains, the second-ever feature-length film from Burundi. He is active in promoting Burundi’s literary culture, has co-founded the Samandari Cafe Littéraire and helping found the Michel Kayoya and Andika Prizes. He is  executive director of Jimbere, a youth-oriented newspaper and lives in Bujumbura, Burundi.

Katherine E. Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life, which was an Editor’s Pick in The New York Times Book Review and which has been featured by People Magazine, The Oprah Magazine, NPR’s Fresh Air, and the goop Podcast. Lightning Flowers was shortlisted for the 2018 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia School of Journalism. Standefer’s previous work appeared in Best American Essays 2016. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona and teaches for Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA. She lives on a mesa in New Mexico with her chickens.

Born in Mexico City, Natalia Treviño is the author of two books of poems: VirginX (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Lavando la Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press, 2014). She has won the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and others. Lavando La Dirty Laundry has recently been translated in a dual-language edition in Albanian and Macedonian. Natalia graduated from the University of Texas / San Antonio and the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s MFA program. She is professor of English at San Antonio’s Northwest Vista College. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, as well as the anthologies The Southern Poetry Anthology, Mirrors Beneath the Earth (Curbstone Press), Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection (Green Writers Press), Contra: Texas Poets Speak Out (FlowerSong Press), and Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century (Cutthroat).