Chaun Ballard’s poetry collection Flight, published by Tupelo Press, is winner of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. The poems give testament to the struggle of skin color in contemporary America. “Utilizing both innovation and tradition, Chaun Ballard gives voice to the silenced, proof to the disenfranchised, and life to the gone.” Chaun Ballard was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and San Bernardino, California. He is a graduate of the MFA Program at UAA, an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review and a Callaloo fellow. For the past eight years, he and his wife have been teaching in West Africa and the Middle East. Chaun Ballard’s poems have appeared ANMLY (FKA Drunken Boat), Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Chiron Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Frontier Poetry, International Poetry Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and Rattle. His voice is the soothing voice of poetry for our time.