Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City, NJ. She works at the intersection of text, sound, and performance and has presented work at Brown University, RISD, and Pratt Institute. She is a graduate of Brown University’s MFA program and has received fellowships from Jack Jones Literary Arts, Cave Canem, CAAPP, and The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches in the department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Her debut titled “speculation, n.” was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the Autumn House Poetry Prize and will be published fall 2021.