elisa is a 21-year-old Mexican-American and a current UC undergraduate working towards a degree in English Literature. Since transferring from community college, they’ve become a communications intern for an arts & humanities initiative, spearheaded a student grant report delivered to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and written + realized a handmade poetry chapbook called the Glossary of Unknowable Nouns, which attempts to reimagine popular images, ideas, and trends fed to a population struggling to stay afloat amidst viral infection, carceral crackdowns, and rapid state militarization. Elisa has been writing for as long as they can remember reading. Creating has led them through the thorniest paths in life. In their beginning stages, they wrote fantastical stories featuring their friends and illustrated them themselves with crayons. As a teenager, they made a home for themselves on Wattpad writing teen fiction, most notably, Screenwalks, and drama. Currently, they like to move between genres and mediums as they see fit, and are most interested in interdisciplinary imaginings of worlds wracked with magic, revolution, and marvelous mundanity, in LGBT people of color prodding unanswerable questions like flesh wounds, and in examinations of love, trauma, and found family. Elisa’s poetry has always relied heavily on images, like blue-black wolves, or bundles of burning rosemary, sometimes while barefoot and filled with benediction, and has earned them a Best of the Net nomination, a Best New Poets nomination, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. Most Fragile Animal, a college play, earned Elisa a festival award and their short fiction, following little girls who lob molotov cocktails at riot cops, has been anthologized and spotlighted by American Book Award winner Rilla Askew. Friends and I have put together protest magazines and short documentaries on gentrification.
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