Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City, NJ. She works at the intersection of text, sound, and performance and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden (DiSC), and The Hurston/Wright Foundation where she will be the inaugural writer-in-residence at Virginia-Tech. She holds a BA in English from Rutgers University and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. Her writing and hybrid/sound work appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Catapult, Obsidian, The Slowdown and The Poetry Project, among others. She has been a featured performer at Brown University, Pratt Institute and featured most recently in virtual programming including The Poetry Project’s New Year’s Marathon. Her debut poetry collection speculation, n. (2021) was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and has been featured in Poets & Writers, The Poetry Foundation, and NPR’s On The Record. She lives in Brooklyn, NY where she teaches in the department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.