We are excited to introduce our newest Tinderboxers, the brilliant & talented Candace Williams & Koh Xin Tian.

 

Candace Williams is a black, queer nerd living a double life. By day, she’s Head of Community Operations at a podcasting startup. By night and subway ride, she’s a poet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Poets Anthology (Brooklyn Arts Press 2017), Bennington Review, Lambda Literary Review, and Copper Nickel, among other places. She graduated cum laude from Claremont McKenna College with a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) and earned her MA in Elementary Education from Stanford University. She’s been awarded a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship, Cave Canem scholarships, and a Best of the Net 2016 nomination. You can find her walking her pit bull down Nostrand Ave, watching too many episodes of Murder, She Wrote, and subtweeting the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (@teacherc).

When asked what Candace looks for in a poem, she says:

“I love poems that are so much their own world that I start to question my own.”

 

 

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Koh Xin Tian is a writer, editor, and translator from Singapore. She is a creative writing lecturer at the National University of Singapore’s University Scholars Programme, and a content strategist at a digital marketing agency. She has written for the Ploughshares blog and has an MFA in poetry from West Virginia University, where she was poetry editor of the Cheat River Review. Xin Tian’s poems are featured in Twelfth House Journal, Softblow, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. 

When asked what Xin Tian looks for in a poem, she says:

“I love poems that are not trying to be some other poem, that pay attention to craft, and that prize effect over intention.”