Born to a Japanese mother and an American father, Hana Widerman is a poet and essayist originally from California. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in English and Creative Writing and won the James Richardson Award in Poetry. She is currently an MFA student at Cornell University, where she works as an assistant poetry editor of EPOCH and teaches a first-year writing class in the Department of Literatures in English. A two-time winner of Cornell's George Harmon Coxe Poetry Prize and a Saltonstall Foundation Fellow, her poetry has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and appears or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Washington Square Review, The Journal, The Offing, The Shore, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere. In the fall, she will return to Cornell University as a lecturer, teaching creative writing and academic composition.