Joshua Jennifer Espinoza (born December 17, 1987) is an American poet from

Riverside, California Riverside is a city in and the county seat of Riverside County, California, United States, in the Inland Empire metropolitan area. It is named for its location beside the Santa Ana River. It is the most populous city in the Inland Empire an ...

. She is a Visiting Professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. Espinoza's works have been published in ''Poetry Magazine'', ''

PEN America PEN America (formerly PEN American Center), founded in 1922 and headquartered in New York City, is a nonprofit organization that works to defend and celebrate free expression in the United States and worldwide through the advancement of litera ...

'', ''Lambda Literary'', ''The Offing'', ''Shabby Doll House'', ''Electric Cereal'', ''Voicemail Poems,'' and

The Rumpus ''The Rumpus'' is an online literary magazine launched on January 20, 2009. The site features interviews, book reviews, essays, comics, and critiques of creative culture as well as original fiction and poetry. The site runs two subscription-base ...

. Espinoza's work covers topics like

mental illness A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Such features may be persistent, relapsing and remitti ...

, coming out as a

transgender A transgender (often abbreviated as trans) person is someone whose gender identity or gender expression does not correspond with their sex assigned at birth. Many transgender people experience dysphoria, which they seek to alleviate through tr ...

woman, as well as universal themes like love, grief, anger, and

beauty Beauty is commonly described as a feature of objects that makes these objects pleasurable to perceive. Such objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of aesthetics, o ...

Bibliography

* ''i'm alive / it hurts / i love it''. Boost House. 2014 * ''THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS.'' Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016. * ''Outside Of The Body There Is Something Like Hope.'' Big Lucks Books. 2018. * ''I'm Alive. It Hurts. I Love It. (Second Edition)'' Big Lucks Books. 2019.

References

External links

''THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS''
book review at goodreads.com

at upthestaircase.org
The shared experiences of poetry with Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
at thecreativeindependent.com 1987 births Living people American women poets American LGBT poets English-language poets Transgender women Writers from Riverside, California 21st-century American poets Patreon creators 21st-century American women writers American transgender writers {{US-poet-1980s-stub