Isela Xitlali Gómez R. is an East LA/Inland Empire transplant who writes to piece together broken stories of family, trauma, healing, and travel a la Southern California. Her art lays its roots in the spaces between jazz and mariachi, taco trucks and chili cheese burgers, oceans and desert and now snow. Isela is a 2015 Winner of the Loft Literary Center's Mentor Series in Creative Nonfiction, a 2017 Beyond the Pure Fellow through Intermedia Arts, and a 2020 fellow of the the Loft Literary Center’s Mirrors and Windows program. Her essay, “It Happened in Fragments,” can be found in “How Dare We! Write,” an anthology of writers of color on the writing life and process. Anaïs Deal-Marquez is a multidisciplinary artist raised in México and the upper midwest. She just finished the manuscript of her first poetry collection, which looks at memory, displacement, home, healing and migration. She has been published in POETRY Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, from Haymarket Books and elsewhere.
