alena hairston/elen gebreab

Her prose and poetry have appeared in Callaloo; In Our Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself, Obsidian III; dANDelion;  BathHouse: A Journal of the Hybrid Arts; nocturnes (re)view, Elixir, SideReality, Doorknobs and BodyPaint, which granted her the Flash Fiction Award, Avoid Strange Men, and QP: Mixed Nuts. She has performed in plays such as A Raisin in the Sun, Jar the Floor, and Better-n-Indins, as well as in films, such as Women Pharaohs for the Discovery Channel. She received her MFA in English and Creative Writing from Brown University where she won the John Hawkes Memorial Prize for Fiction. A 2004 Poetry Fellowship recipient from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, a 2006 finalist for the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and a 2007-09 Cave Canem Fellow, Alena is an English Instructor at Solano College in Fairfield, California. Her collection of poetry, The Logan Topographies, was a Selected Winner from Bear Star Press and won Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky Memorial Prize for Poetry.