Sherrie Fernandez-Williams earned her MFA in Writing from Hamline University. She is a 2021-2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a 2021 Black Voices in Children’s Literature winner. She received an Artist Initiative Award through the Minnesota State Arts Board, a Beyond the Pure Fellowship, a SASE/Jerome Grant, a Jones’ Commission Award through the Playwrights’ Center, a Givens Black Writers Collaborative Fellowship, and was a Loft Mentor Series Winner in Creative Nonfiction. Author of Soft: A Memoir, Fernandez-Williams has published poems in journals including New Limestone Review, Aquifer: The Florida Review, and Duke University Press, among others. Her essays can be found in the anthologies including, We are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, How Dare we Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse and The Poverty and Education Reader. Her book of poems, Goddess of the Whole Self is forthcoming, 2023. She co-curates the Queer Voices Reading Series with LM Brimmer in collaboration with Quatrefoil Library and Hennepin County Libraries in Minnesota.