Deborah Poe has worked as environmental activist in Austin, hostel clerk and bartender in Paris, a waitress in Taos, engineering assistant at Oregon Steel Mill in Portland, as editor and international program manager in Seattle, and as educator in Washington state and New York. She is working on publishing her first collection of poetry, Our Parenthetical Ontology, and on a forthcoming book entitled Elements. Her poems were nominated for Pushcart Prizes the last two years and have appeared in journals such as Drunken Boat, Anemone Sidecar, Sugar Mule, and Snow Monkey and in the anthology Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS From the Black Diaspora.