Isela Xitlali Gómez R. is an East LA/Inland Empire transplant who writes to piece together broken stories of family, trauma, 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 and a 2017 Beyond the Pure Fellow through Intermedia Arts.