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Roda Avelar is a poet and book designer from Fresno, California.

She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of California Riverside, and a BA in English literature from California State University Fresno.

She is the winner of a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She has also been a fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Community of Writers, and the Letras Latinas initiative “Poets & Art: Ekphrasis at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.”

She has designed multiple full-length poetry and prose manuscripts for Noemi Press and serves as art director for the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Writing the Community anthologies.

Her manuscript, Jotxland, a lyrical and experimental unfolding of the first few years of her transition, was a finalist for the 2025 Omnidawn Open Book Contest.

Her poetry can be found in About Place Journal; Poetry magazine; Pleiades; Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing; Flies, Cockroaches, & Poets; and elsewhere.

Find her on the internet, here.