Her Poetic Origins

is the author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir (Beacon, 2014) and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Seal Press, 2002). Her essays have appeared in Brevity, Bellingham Review, Dogwood, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, and The Rumpus, among others. The former editor of ColorLines magazine, she has reported for The Atlantic, Slate, New York Times, and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” She is a regular contributor to the Buddhist magazine Tricycle and an Associate Professor of creative writing at Northwestern University.