LaWanda Walters is the author of Light Is the Odalisque (Press 53, Silver Concho Poetry Series, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The American Journal of Poetry, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, and other literary magazines, as well as in Best American Poetry and Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (Dartmouth College Press, 2014). She lives in Cincinnati and received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020.