Gionni Ponce is a prose writer living in Tempe, Arizona. She is a proud alumna of Macondo, Tin House, and VONA. She has been awarded fellowships to the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers Workshop, and the Fine Arts Work Center. In 2018, she was named a Writer in South Asia Fellow by Indiana University. In 2024, she was selected as a Poesiæuropa Fellow to travel to Italy to present on Octavia Butler’s influence on women of color writing sci-fi.

While teaching at Indiana University, she was awarded the Earle J. S. Ho Award for Teaching Creative Writing and the Culbertson First Year Teaching Award. She’s organized workshops for young writers, assistant directed national writing workshops, and continues to host readings, workshops, and collaborative projects as an arts administrator. Wherever she goes, she aims to create storytelling space for traditionally marginalized stories as a writer, artist, cultural curator, and creative writing instructor.

Gionni also keeps an eye towards visual art and is always trying her hand at something new: book binding, zines, resin casting, photography, pottery. This year, she’s creating a film-poem with two other artists as a 2024 Patchwork Fellow. Her work is published in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Ocotillo Review, Kenyon Review Online, and South Carolina Review. She is currently working on a short story collection centered on bilingualism and multi-generational conflict in Mexican-American families. You can learn more on X: @gpisme.