Cantrice Janelle Penn

Cantrice Janelle Penn is a Black, queer, femme writer, decolonial copy editor, linguist, and artist. Her upbringing was shaped by forked tongues, lottery dream books, and the steady waters of the Powhatan River in Shocquohocan (or, Richmond, Virginia).

Cantrice is a VONA/Voices Fellow, a 2015 Writer-In-Residence at Weymouth Center for the Arts, and the 2016 winner of the Firefly Ridge Literary Magazine Women’s Writing Award. She also serves as a panel judge for the creative writing awards at Salem College. Her work will appear/has appeared in several publications, including Kweli, Cunjuh, The Fem, Black Girl Dangerous, Sally Hemings Dreams, and After Ferguson, In Solidarity (Mourning Glory Publishing, 2015).

She holds a degree in languages (with a concentration in French) from George Mason University and a certificate in Professional Sequence in Editing from University of California, Berkeley Extension. Cantrice is developing a poetry collection and a full-length work of fiction. 

Her writing can also be found at cantricejanellepenn.com.

Participation at the 2017 West End Poetry Festival

• The Poetry of Resistance | Saturday, October 21 | 2:30 to 4 pm | Century Center
• For a full schedule and descriptions of all sessions, see the festival schedule.