Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. She holds a Master’s degree from California State University Fullerton and a Master’s in Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College. She is the author of eleven books of poetry and fiction, including Girl With Death Mask (chosen by Ross Gay as the winner of the Blue Light Book Prize/Indiana Review Press), and the novel Trinity Sight, which was a finalist for the Arizona-New Mexico Book Awards and won The Southwest Book Award. Her last novel River Woman, River Demon (2022) was chosen for Amazon’s Book Club, as a National Together We Read Library Pick, and featured on CBS Mornings. It also won an International Latino Book Award in the Rudolfo Anaya Latino-Focused Fiction category. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, Ploughshares, and many other literary journals. She’s received the Southwest Book Award, New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize chosen by Tyehimba Jess, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize chosen by Ada Limón, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. Givhan has taught at the University of Washington Bothell’s MFA program as well as at Western New Mexico University. A guest lecturer at universities across the country, she was most recently the 2024 Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at The University of New Mexico. Her latest novel SALT BONES was published by Mulholland/Little, Brown, in July 2025.