Keona Blanks is a writer from the island of O‘ahu. She is the author of the chapbook Poured into the lake, the lava simply flowed along the bottom of the water like limbs slipping beneath fresh linen. (Cantor Arts Center, 2024), and is published in Mongabay, The Leland Quarterly, and Fronds: A Stanford Anthology of Environmental Justice Storytelling. She is a graduate of Stanford University, where she was a Cantor Scholar and Levinthal student of Stegner Fellow Dāshaun Washington and won the Planet Earth Arts Creative Writing Prize. Her current book project, Gobi Dust: A Geomorphology of Belonging, was awarded the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Arts. She is an MFA student at the University of Minnesota, where she is the recipient of a Gessel Award for Excellence in Literary Nonfiction.