W.J. Herbert’s debut collection, Dear Specimen, (Beacon Press, 2021) was selected by Kwame Dawes as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series and awarded a 2022 Maine Book Award for Poetry. Awarded the 2022 Arts & Letters/Rumi Prize for Poetry, her work also appears, or is forthcoming, in The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Herbert served for seven years as coordinator of the bimonthly poetry series and annual poetry competition offered by dA Center for the Arts in Pomona, California. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio and raised in Southern California where she earned a bachelor’s in studio art and a master’s in flute performance. She lives in Kingston, New York and Portland, Maine.