M’Bilia Meekers was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana with roots in Belgium and Sierra Leone. She is the author of one chapbook, Wish for a Drowned Daughter and has received fellowships from Poets & Writers, Cave Canem, and The Watering Hole. She is the winner of Tulane University’s Academy of American Poets Prize (2015) and the Marble Faun Poetry Award (2011), among other honors. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Guernica, Poet Lore, Tinderbox, Calamity, Wildness, Tulane Review and other publications. She received her Bachelors in English Literature from Tulane University in 2015 and her MFA in Creative Writing from NYU in 2017. Meekers lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and is writing her first collection of poetry.