SPOKEN WORD
Bianca X, Ph.D., is an award-winning writer and multidisciplinary artist from Kentucky. An Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University, Bianca is the author of five collections of poems, most recently Black Mermaid (Argus House Press, 2018), and the co-editor of three poetry anthologies, most recently Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets (University of Kentucky Press, 2018). Bianca is currently at work on a full-length play, Medusa: A Greek Triumph, commissioned by Berea College. You can learn more about her work at: www.biancaspriggs.com
Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950's Eastern Kentucky and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She has a B.A. from Harvard, J.D. from Duke University and an MFA from University of Iowa. Excerpts of her forthcoming second novel, Kif, have appeared in various literary magazines. She teaches creative writing at the University of California Davis.