Arisa White and Raina J. Leon
Arisa White
Arisa White received her Master of Fine Arts from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a Cave Canem fellow and the author of Post Pardon, Hurrah’s Nest and A Penny Saved. Her debut collection, Hurrah’s Nest, won the 2012 San Francisco Book Festival Award for poetry and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, California Book Award and the 2013 Wheatley Book Award. A 2013 – 14 recipient of an Investing in Artist Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation and an advisory board member for Flying Object, White is a Bachelor of Fine Arts faculty member at Goddard College.
Raina J. Léon
Raina J. León — CantoMundo fellow, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective — has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols and Boogeyman Dawn. She has received numerous fellowships and residencies including the Macdowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland and Ragdale. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly and international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latino and Latina arts. She is an assistant professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California.