Erica Vital-Lazare is a writer and curator who uses her creative practices to generate space where Black women’s lives can be seen and heard. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Catalyst, Sojourner, Thrice, Callaloo II, and The Baffler. She is the editor of McSweeney’s Of the Diaspora series, co-curator and writer behind the photo-essay exhibition series Obsidian & Neon: Building Black Life and Identity in Las Vegas, curator of the 2021-22 Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art photography exhibition Seeing/Seen, and a
professor of Creative Writing and Marginalized Voices in Dystopian Literature at the College of Southern Nevada.