Malia Márquez is the author of the novels City of Smoke and Sea (Red Hen Press ‘25) and This Fierce Blood (Acre Books, ‘21). She holds a BFA in Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art & Design and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Through fractured form, satire, comedy, and a fascination with liminal states, she loves to play with stretching the bounds of conventional narrative while retaining elements of the familiar. Malia’s fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in Poetry, Literary Hub, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Born in Santa Fe, New Mexico to parents of Chicano, Native, and European descent, she has taught creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLAx. She lives in Los Angeles.