Claritza Maldonado, better known as Clari (as stated by her gold cadenita), is a creative writer, poet, and researcher from Chicago. She holds a BA in Linguistics with a minor in Latina/o Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a graduate student at Brown University in the American Studies PhD program with a Public Humanities focus. Her poetry has been published at the Wanderer Poetry literary website. Her research and creative writing purposefully overlap by way of language and content. Broadly, her research interests include cultural studies, media studies, performance studies, and Latina/o literature. As an aspiring curator/educator, she aims to situate her work between cityscape and island, intermingled with Spanglish. Her poems are stories of familia, history, conversation, observation, cultura, and resistance.