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Jess Rizkallah

Jess Rizkallah performing at the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam in Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Valerie Jane Kwok.

Jess Rizkallah performing at the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam in Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Valerie Jane Kwok.

Jess Rizkallah (or, sometimes, Jess Riz) is a Lebanese-American writer, illustrator, and coffee slinger living between Boston and New York. She’s an alum of Lesley University, MFA candidate at NYU and founding editor at Maps For Teeth magazine / pizza pi press. She’s a Pushcart Prize nominee and nationally ranked WoWPS poet (2016). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot, Nailed Magazine, Button Poetry, Alien Mouth, HEArt Online and on her mother’s fridge. She thinks third person is weird but hopes you’ll forgive her. Talk to her about whales and find her at jessrizkallah.com or jessrizkallah@gmail.com.

(I found the Cantab during my freshmen year at Lesley because Anis Mojgani was featuring and he’s my favorite poet. I had glass surgically removed from the bottom of my foot the week before so I was on crutches / really bad at using crutches and I almost didn’t go at all. But POEMS — and that’s why the Cantab is stuck with me forever.)