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.

"...Espinoza’s resilient vulnerability makes for a wonderfully accessible collection exploring entanglements between desires, fears, misgivings, traumas, mundane triumphs, and more. Yet the collection resists easy categorization ... I Don’t Want to Be Understood is interested in one’s own value to voice their experience, not a need to make a body knowable; in connections, not academics; survival, not compliance. With its dismissal of easy legibility, Espinoza’s latest volume is one to add not only to any collection on trans poetics, but one for any reader interested in confessional and lyric poetry that refuses to be neatly pinned down."
—Rhiannon Thorne, Up the Staircase Quarterly

"I Don't Want To Be Understood is existence as resistance. It dreams of a world free of fixed labels, chronicling the nuance and complexity of trans experience and erasure. Forging new identity with each page, J. Jennifer Espinoza pushes beyond every boundary, writing that "it helps to have a name even though a name is a room you can never leave." I Don't Want To Be Understood dismantles cishet narratives of 'normalcy,' reminding us that queerness is a vast, expansive spectrum."
—Wroxanna Work

"In Joshua Jennifer Espinoza's undaunted fourth poetry collection, I Don't Want to Be Understood, transgender identity allows for reinvention but also entails fear of physical and legislative violence. ... Alliteration and repetition construct litanies of rejection but, ultimately, of hope: 'When I call myself a woman I am praying.'"
—Rebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness

"In this autobiographical poetry collection, the poet traces her life from childhood to the present, including her repressive religious upbringing. She rejects conventional trans narratives, embracing the messiness and complexities of her reality. These poems stand in opposition to the idea that trans people have to convince society to grant them personhood or permission to exist."
—Book Riot

"Espinoza tenderly explores what it means to be a trans woman in a world that rejects the mere notion of transness. ... The language and images in these poems imbue difficult—sometimes negative—thoughts and situations with a sense of beauty and wonder. For the speaker, life is not just about survival but about living as fully as possible, on her own terms."
—Leonora Simonovis, The Poetry Foundation

"...it was such a joy to spend time with the words of this artist I admire. It was at once familiar and new, as I have changed, Jennifer has changed. Her voice holds the same power and wit that first connected with me, but nothing here is a retread. It’s a strong collection of work, unafraid to take formal risks. The thrill of I Don’t Want to Be Understood is the ways it surprised me and the ways it surprises even from first page to last."
—Drew Burnett Gregory, Autostraddle

“I Don’t Want to Be Understood is a blistering and a balm. Its speaker holds inside herself the garden, lush, the attending rot, seed and bloom, and the desire to be tended and tenderly so. Alongside the garden, Espinoza charts the cosmology of a woman come into herself in a world of violence, a world that would undo the wonder of this speaker. I leave this book deeply moved by Espinoza’s insistence on nurturing a green hope, a green heart.”
—Donika Kelly

"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