Tara Shea Burke is a queer poet and teacher from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She's a writing instructor, editor, creative coach and yoga teacher who has taught and lived in Virginia, New Mexico and Colorado. Her writing appears in Erase the Patriarchy, a book of sexual assault and rape erasures, edited by Isobel O’Hare from University of Hell Press, and Reading Queer, Poetry in the Time of Chaos, edited by Neil de la Flor and Maureen Seaton from Anhinga Press, as well as many journals and anthologies. She is a board member for Sinister Wisdom, the longest running multicultural lesbian literary and arts journal; she edited Issue 106: The Lesbian Body. She believes in community building and radical support for any human that wants to tell their stories, and edits and coaches writers through creative work, dissertations, personal projects, and movement-based writing for healing and growth. In the academic classroom, she wants her first year college students to feel supported more that they feel critiqued, and learn how to use their voices to become active, engaged, and if lucky, radical citizens of this earth. She is an Instructor of Focused Inquiry at Virginia Commonwealth University.