Twice a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry (2010, 2013), Grace C. Ocasio is a recipient of the 2014 North Carolina Arts Council-funded Regional Artist Project Grant Award. She won honorable mention in the 2012 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition, the Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka Poetry Prize in 2011, and was a scholarship recipient to the 2011 Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her first full-length collection, The Speed of Our Lives, is forthcoming from BlazeVOX Books, Summer 2014. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Earth’s Daughters, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and numerous other publications. Her chapbook, Hollerin from This Shack, was published by Ahadada Books in 2009. She is a Soul Mountain Retreat fellow, Fine Arts Work Center and Frost Place alumna, and member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. She received her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, her MA in English from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
