Carmen Gim�nez Smith received a BA in English at San Jose State University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of four poetry collections, including Milk and Filth , a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She was awarded an American Book Award for her memoir Bring Down the Little Birds (2010) and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for Goodbye, Flicker (2012). She also co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (2014), an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing. Be Recorder will be published by Graywolf Press in 2019. She now serves on the planning committee for CantoMundo and on the board of RASA, which sponsors the Thinking… Its Presence conference on race and art. She serves as the publisher of Noemi Press. She is a professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech and the poetry editor for The Nation .