Victoria Bañales is the 2025-2027 Watsonville Poet Laureate. A Chicanx writer and educator, she is the author of The Sun Will Not Harm You by Day, Nor the Moon by Night and the founder of Journal X, a social justice literary arts magazine, which was awarded the Superior Distinction by the National Council of Teachers of English. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Feminist Studies from UCSC, and teaches composition and creative writing at Cabrillo College, where she also serves as the Faculty Senate President. Her work has been supported by residencies at Hedgebrook, Storyknife, and Vermont Studio Center. She is working on her first novel titled Candelaria.

Website: vickybanales.com
IG: @vicky.banales
Facebook: vicky.banales.56

2026 PAWA Scholar
Camille Hernandez (she/they) is the Poet Laureate of the city of Anaheim (2024-2028). She is a queer Black and Filipina author moving through the world embodying both ancestral philosophies in what she calls kapwa womanism. She authored Motherlands (Finishing Line Press, 2025), The Hero and the Whore (Westminster John Knox Press, 2023) and co-edited Butterflies Over Land: An Anthology for Immigrant Rights (Wokelicious, 2026).

Website: www.camillehernandez.com

Carole Hsiao (she/her), is first-born daughter of refugees from China and lives in Seattle, WA (land of the Coast Salish). She is an educator and activist in realms of arts, public mental health and community-based journalism. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her research focused on the need for the arts in the education of marginalized middle school girls. She is currently at work on a series of essays on the theme of filial piety in her family’s journey from pre-1949 China to now. Her work has been supported by Anaphora Arts, Roots Wounds Words, VONA and McCormack Writing Center.

Raquel Jardim is a writer from Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Born to migrants from the semiarid region, she learned from a young age how to live in the liminal spaces between alienation and belonging, poverty and wealth. A taste for the contradictory and complex led her to leave home at sixteen to pursue high school in Latvia, where she found her love for anglophone literature. Now an undergraduate in the United States, she is exploring her own writing voice through her working novel Canteiros, an epistolary work spanning migration, folklore, and syncretic faith in Brazil. In her spare time, she writes snail mail and maintains an online newsletter to update her friends across the world.

Laurie Lambert is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of a scholarly book, Comrade Sister (University of Virginia Press, 2020) on Caribbean women writers and revolution. She is also the director of Tambu, a documentary on Jamaican folk culture. Lambert has reviewed Caribbean fiction for sx salon. She earned a PhD in English from New York University. She is writing her first novel.

Website: www.laurierlambert.com/
IG: @laurie.r.lambert

2026 PAWA Scholar

2026 PAWA Scholar
Bri Stokes (she/her) is a writer, editor, curator, cultural worker, producer, and poet born, raised and living in Los Angeles, on unceded Tongva land. A 2018 recipient of the El Camino College Myriad’s “Best Short Story” award, Stokes’ writing has appeared in BuzzFeed, Epiphany, the Northridge Review, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook on the cyclical nature of envy and desire, A Throat Full of Forest-Dirt, was published in 2023 via Bottlecap Press. Stokes is a 2024 Voodoonauts Fellow, a 2024 Resident with The Seventh Wave, and the former Managing Editor of SKEW Magazine.

IG/Threads: @bri_stokes_writes
TikTok: @bri_stokes_
Substack: @bristokes ("Fables from Saturn")
Bluesky: @bristokes.bsky.social

Jane Udochi is a Nigerian speculative fiction writer exploring the contradictions people hold: how desire, insecurity, and cultural expectation collide to shape a person. She uses psychological tension to examine what it means to live truthfully within prescribed identities — where language, ritual, and the speculative collide in a deliberate act of un-silencing. She has trained at Tin House and GrubStreet, and was longlisted for the 2025 Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize. In active and intentional pursuit of honing her craft, she feeds her imagination on diaspora literature, anime, and story in every form it takes.