MARIA ISABELLE CARLOS is a writer and editor from Missouri. She was the 2023 Unbound Book Festival Emerging Poet, a 2021 Lambda Literary Fellow, winner of the 2021 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Contest, and winner of the 2020 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award from the Center for Women Writers. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net and has appeared in The Missouri Review, Passages North, Salt Hill, and Pleiades, among other journals.
As an executive editor at Bull City Press and former editor-in-chief of the Nashville Review, nonfiction editor at Zone 3, and associate editor at Haymarket Books, Maria has had the honor of working with many poetry, fiction, and nonfiction authors over the years, including K-Ming Chang, Joshua Nguyen, Ananda Lima, and Silky Shah.
Maria was awarded the 2009 Thomas Wolfe Scholarship from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she received her B.A. in English. She then worked as a bartender in New Orleans for several years before pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where she earned the 2021 Kathryn Sedberry Poetry Prize and the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize. She lives and works in Chicago with her beloved dog, Sushi.
Photo Credit: Shayna DiBlasi