Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California. She is the author of God’s Will for Monsters, which won an American Book Award in 2018 and the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Regional Poetry Prize. Her middle-grade novel-in-progress, My Summer of Shapeshifting, placed second in the Abrams Amplify Awards. She was appointed the 2018-2020 Inlandia Literary Laureate, during which she founded a summer writing program for young people, Poetry is Power, among other community projects. She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology of Philippine Myths with Lis P. Sipin-Gabon. The second edition of her comics resources, Experiencing Comics: An Introduction to Reading, Discussing and Creating Comics, was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Sunday Morning Transport, Poets & Writers Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, As/Us, Yellow Medicine Review, The Lit Pub, The Collagist, Bone Bouquet, PANK, Muzzle Magazine, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, among others. She is an organizer with The Digital Sala. Rachelle lives, loves, and writes in Southern California.