Shayla Hawkins is a Detroit native, poet, and writer whose works have been in Calabash, Crab Orchard Review, tongues of the ocean, The Taj Mahal Review, and Poets & Writers, among other publications. She is a Cave Canem founding fellow and has been a featured reader at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and the Library of Congress. She also is a past winner of The Caribbean Writer's Canute A. Brodhurst Prize in Short Fiction and an Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her first book, Carambola, was published in 2012 by David Robert Books. National Book Award-winning author Charles Johnson cited its poems as "deliciously sensuous, smart...vivid, and luminous with the life of the spirit...." Hawkins has also published poems in several anthologies including Mona Poetica, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Leonardo DaVinci's Mona Lisa painting; Chopin with Cherries, celebrating the life and musical genius of Frederic Chopin; Delirious: A Poetic Celebration of Prince; Joys of the Table: An Anthology of Culinary Verse; The Practicing Poet; and A Constellation of Kisses.