Protected: Done Right
The beneficiary says, / It’s time to lie down. / The petitioner says, / All right. Yes.
Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place (Alice James Books, 2025), The Ghost Wife, which won the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, and is a coeditor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins 2024). She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown. Her work won a Pushcart Prize in 2024, and was featured in the Best of the Net 2023 anthology and Best New Poets 2022. Currently she is a critic at large for Poetry Northwest and co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.
Kaya Joan is a multi-disciplinary Afro-Indigenous (Vincentian, Kanien’kehá:ka, Jamaican, settler) artist born and raised in T’karonto, Dish with One Spoon treaty territory, based in what is currently known as Prince Edward County, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, and Wendat territory. Kaya’s practice explores Black and Indigenous futurity, archival practices, mapping, storytelling, and relationship to place.
