Aziza Barnes is a Los Angeles native brown woman poet living in Washington Heights, New York. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was published July 2013 from Button Poetry Press. You can find her work in Muzzle Magazine, NYU’s The Grey Area, West 10th Literary Journal and in PLUCK! (upcoming). A Callaloo fellow, she recently attended their inaugural UK workshop. She is the recipient of the 2013-14 NYU Gallery Prize for Radical Presence in Black Contemporary Art for her poem “descendants.” She writes for members of the Diaspora, to promote transformative empathy and for her ancestors, both known and unknown.