AZ Poets Speak: Black Lives Matter

Jabari Jawan Allen, a Chicago, IL native, has received fellowships and scholarships from Tin House, Community of Writers, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, VONA, among others. Along with Jari Bradley and Willie Kinard III, he is a member of the Black queer gospel trio The Upper Room Collective. A Pushcart nominee, Allen’s poems either appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Vinyl, Virginia Quarterly Review, Wildness, the anthology The Impossible Beast: Queer Erotic Poems, and elsewhere. An Arizona Commission on the Arts grant recipient, Allen currently lives in Phoenix. (Author Photo: Jia Oak Baker)

Raquel Denis is an Afro-Latina writer and musician based in Phoenix, AZ. She graduated from Arizona State University with a B.A. in Creative Writing Poetry. She is a teaching artist and library assistant. Her work explores complex family relationships, the politics of blackness, and historical legacies passed down through migration and diaspora. (Author Photo: Shaunte Glover)

Erin Noehre is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She has received fellowships from the Graduate College at Arizona State University, as well as the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Her work is featured or forthcoming from Pidgeonholes, Sonora Review, and Passages North.