How Fire is a Story, Waiting

Melinda Palacio is an award-winning poet and novelist. She lives in Santa Barbara and New Orleans. She is a 2007 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellow and a 2009 poetry alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her poetry chapbook, "Folsom Lockdown" won Kulupi Press' Sense of Place 2009 award. She is the author of the novel, Ocotillo Dreams (ASU Bilingual Press 2011), for which she received the Mariposa Award for Best First Book Awards and a 2012 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. Her short story and excerpt of her novel-in-progress was a 2012 Glimmer Train Finalist. She also writes a column for La Bloga. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, PALABRA: A Magazine of Chicano & Latino Literary Art, Pilgrimage Magazine, Eleven Eleven, Black Renaissance?Renaissance Noire, Southern Poetry Anthology, New Poets of the American West, and Mary: a Journal of New Writing. Tia Chucha Press published her first full-length poetry collection, How Fire Is A Story, Waiting. (2012)