Meliza Bañales is originally from Los Angeles. The youngest of four children in a working-poor, Mestizo family, Bañales left Los Angles in 1996 and was the first to attend college in her family. She published her first poems when she was seventeen in The Lesbian News. She went on to become the first Latina to ever win a Poetry Slam Championship on the west coast in 2002(Oakland), the 2002 winner of the People Before Profits Poetry Prize, and published her first book, Say It With Your Whole Mouth, at the age of twenty-five.Meliza Bañales is the author of Girl With the Glass Throat, Scratching a Surface, and Say It With Your Whole Mouth (nominated for a Poetry Center Book Award in 2004). Her work has been featured in the anthologies Revolutionary Voices (ed., by Ami Sonny) and Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing-Up Working-Class (ed., by Michelle Tea), both of which were LAMBDA nominees, as well as in Transfer, Lodestar Quarterly, and Laundry Pen. She was the 2002 Oakland Grand Slam Champ and the first Latina on the west coast to win a poetry slam championship and was the 2002 winner of the People Before Profits Poetry Prize. She has fiction in the upcoming anthology Baby, Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writing (ed., by Michelle Tea), four entries in the first ever Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice, a short film, Do the Math, with Mary Guzmán in Frameline 2006 (which was also the winner of a 2006 Frameline Completion Grant), and a second book of poems, 51 Poems About Nothing At All, out in June from Monkey Press. She writes reviews and short articles highlighting women of color for Girlfriends and On Our Backs magazines and splits her time between Savannah, GA and the Bay Area.
Bañales' work has been called "edgy" and "muy caliente" by the Santa Cruz Metro and Wiretap Magazine writes of Bañales, "...she is in command of the audience. Her strong voice and captivating presence transports on-lookers to the moments that she is describing. She makes her audience feel as if they are right there with her...She is one loud Latina."
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