Lauren Alleyne hails from the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry and a graduate certificate in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University. Her fiction, poetry, and non-fiction have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including Black Arts Quarterly, Women's Studies Quarterly, The Carribbean Writer, The Crab Orchard Review, Belleview Literary Review, The Banyan Review, Let Spirits Speak, Guernica, Growing Up Girl, and Gathering Ground, among others. A Cave Canem graduate, her work has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 2010 Small Axe Literary Prize, a 2012 Lyrical Iowa Award, an Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, and honorable mention in the 2009 Reginald Shepard Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is currently the Poet-in-Residence and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dubuque in Iowa.