A recent Pushcart Prize nominee, Grace C. Ocasio placed as a finalist in the 2016 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in Poetry. She is also a recipient of the 2014 North Carolina Arts Council Regional Artist Project Grant. She won honorable mention in the 2012 James Applewhite Poetry Prize, the 2011 Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka Poetry Prize, and a 2011 Napa Valley Writers' Conference scholarship. Her first full-length collection, The Speed of Our Lives, was published by BlazeVOX Books in 2014. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Black Renaissance Noire, Court Green, Poetry South, and Two Hawks Quarterly. Her chapbook, Hollerin from This Shack, was published by Ahadada Books in 2009. She is a Soul Mountain Retreat fellow, Fine Arts Work Center and Frost Place alumna, and member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. She received her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, her MA in English from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.