Tisa Bryant is the author of hybrid essay collection Unexplained Presence. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced literary journal, The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborates with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book series of visual mixtape love letters to black people and black culture, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Why Are They So Afraid of the Lotus?, Lana Turner, and Letters to the Future: BLACK Women/RADICAL Writing, as well as various arts exhibition catalogs and shows, including the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2022 Artist-in-Residence program. Unexplained Presence will be reissued by Wave Books in 2024, and her next book, Residual, a meditation on grief, intimacy and the archive, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. A Boston native and longtime resident of Los Angeles, Bryant is Assistant Professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and lives in Iowa City.