Shayla Hawkins is from Detroit, Michigan. She is the author of Carambola and Exquisite by September. She is a winner of The Caribbean Writer Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for Short Fiction and The John Edgar Wideman Microstory Contest. Exquisite by September was a 2020 runner up for the Cave Canem/Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize and is now available from EastOver Press.