Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Poem-a-day @poets.org, and elsewhere. She is the author of I'm Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019) and THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (The Accomplices 2016). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and is currently a professor of creative writing. Jennifer lives in California with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their cat and dog.

"There are few writers as attuned to the potential of metaphor as Jennifer Espinoza, whose poems make this gesture something more like alchemy. From the first poem, where a trans woman stopped by the TSA blooms into a cloud of energy, Espinoza's poems enact a radical, surrealist, transmutation; her strange, dream-like recollections are spaces of un- and re-making, herself and the world. I Don't Want To Be Understood is simply a triumph—virtuosic, heartbreaking, and searing in its social critiques."
—torrin a. greathouse