Ian-Khara Ellasante is a Black, queer, gender-infinite poet, parent, teacher, and cultural studies scholar. Their poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, The Feminist Wire, Obsidian, The Volta, From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Writers Write the Northeast, RHINO, and elsewhere. Ian-Khara is a Cave Canem fellow, Point Foundation scholar, recipient of the New Millennium Award for Poetry, and finalist for the National Poetry Series 2024 competition. Their critical writing, including the essays “Dear Trans Studies, Can You Do Love?” and "Radical Sovereignty, Rhetorical Borders, and the Everyday Decolonial Praxis of Indigenous Peoplehood and Two-Spirit Reclamation,” has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Families in Society. Ian-Khara is a Point Foundation Scholar and an alum of the University of Memphis (BA) and the University of Arizona (MA and PhD). Proudly hailing from Memphis, Ian-Khara has also loved living and writing in Tucson, Brooklyn, and now southern Maine, where they teach Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana at Bates College on the occupied and unceded lands of the Wabanaki peoples, the sovereign People of the Dawnland.