Taiwana Shambley (she/her) is a fiction writer, story organizer, and student & practitioner of Black Radical Tradition from Saint Paul, Minnesota. A firm believer in the premise that young people wield radical imaginations, Taiwana co-founded and launched End Youth Prisons MN in 2022, a youth-led, abolitionist campaign to end the state’s youth carceral system through a focus on shifting public narrative and applying radical theories. She’s an MFA student in Fiction at Warren Wilson College, graduating from Augsburg University with a B.A. in English and African American Studies in 2021. She’s a proud alumni of the Hip Hop organization TruArtSpeaks. Taiwana’s family has roots in Texarkana and St. Louis and her ancestors are indigenous to Nigeria, Cameroon, and Congo. Nowadays you might find her camping out in bookstores and coffee shops in her home of South Minneapolis. taiwanashambley.com