Rio Cortez is a Pushcart-nominated poet, who has received fellowships from Poet's House, Cave Canem, and Canto Mundo Foundations. She has been a recipient of the Sarah Lawrence College Lucy Grealy Prize in Poetry, the 2012 Poets & Writers Amy Award, a 2015 Jerome Foundation Grantee, a finalist for the 2017 June Jordan Fellowship, and a semi-finalist for the 2018 Boston Review Discovery Prize. Rio is a graduate of the MFA program at NYU. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including The Miami Rail, The Offing, Cortland Review, Prairie Schooner, and Buzzfeed. Rio Cortez was selected by Ross Gay as the inaugural winner of the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for her manuscript, I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space Between Mountains, available from Jai-Alai Books. Her debut children's book, ABC's of Black History will be released in the fall of 2020 from Workman Books. Born and raised in Salt Lake City, she now lives, writes, and works in Harlem.