Selected by Alexis Rhone Fancher, Poetry Editor
Most Recent: May 12, 2022
Juanita E. Mantz (“JEM”) is a writer, a USC Law educated lawyer, a performer and podcaster who believes writing has the power to change the world. She graduated from UCR in 1999 and from USC Law in 2002. She has been a criminal defense attorney with the Riverside County Public Defender for over a decade representing mentally ill clients.Juanita is also a creative nonfiction writer whose YA memoir is titled "Tales of an Inland Empire Girl" (Los Nietos Press, Jan 2022) and she also has a hybrid chapbook that challenges mass incarceration policies titled "Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender, or how I became a punk rock lawyer” (Bamboo Dart Press, Aug 2021). Her stories have been published in literary journals, newspapers & anthologies. She is an alumna of the VONA & Macondo workshops and serves on the Board of Directors of the Inlandia Institute.Juanita has presented at the UCR Punk Conference, AWP, Listen to Your Mother, Burbank and Beyond Baroque. She produced and taught the ASA 2020 Freedom Course on Combatting Mass Incarceration. She will be appearing at UCR Writers Week in February. She is in the low residency MFA nonfiction creative writing program at UNO.Check out her “Life of JEM” blog on blogspot and her video podcast of the same name where JEM does live interviews with writers streaming on Facebook and Twitter.You can find her on Twitter @lifeofjem and on Insta @lifeofjem1.Find everything on her author website: https://juanitaemantz.com.