Biography
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is the author of two poetry collections, There Should Be Flowers and i'm alive / it hurts / i love it. Her poetry explores, among other things, being a transgender woman, desire, beauty, anger, and queer strength. People desperately trying to find a means of survival in a hostile universe populate her poems. Espinoza’s language, which veers between direct and surreal, attempts to recreate her subjective experience: “My trauma and my position in this world as a trans woman mean I am often floating between extreme dissociation and intense jolts of the harshness of reality,” she explains. Espinoza, a self-taught poet in her early career, is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of California Riverside.