Darius Stewart is the author of Intimacies in Borrowed Light (EastOver Press, 2022) and Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir (Belt Publishing, 2024). His poetry and creative nonfiction have been featured in Arkansas International, Brink, Callaloo, Fourth Genre, Verse Daily, and others. His work was also named a Notable Essay or Literary Nonfiction in The Best American Essays 2022. Darius holds an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2021, the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame honored Darius with the inaugural Emerging Writer Award, and he was recently named a 2024 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow. Darius lives in Iowa City with his dog, Gizmo, and is a Lulu “Merle” Johnson Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Iowa.