Vida James is Puerto Rican by way of New York, a social worker by trade. She is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and a 2023-2024 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. Her writing has been supported by Periplus, Storyknife, Tin House, Bread Loaf, MASS MoCA, the St. Botolph Club Foundation, and VONA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Story, New England Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn where she is at work on her novel, a polyphonic exploration of the carceral state.