Rae Paris is from Carson, California (Tongva homelands) with roots extending to New Orleans (Chitimacha homelands). She is the author of The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory (Wayne State University Press, 2017), which remembers her father’s life and death within an assemblage of past and present racial violence and resistance to terror in the United States. Of The Forgetting Tree, Carolyn Forché writes,”This is not a usual first book and its poet docent has given us fair warning. This is not the regular tour.” Poet Tony Medina describes The Forgetting Tree as “an auspicious and audacious debut from a poet and prose stylist who does not play.” Paris’s work has been supported by an NEA Literature Fellowship, and residencies from the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Hambidge Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA). She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington, which sits on Coast Salish homelands.