Yena Sharma Purmasir is a poet and essayist from New York City. She was the Queens Teen Poet Laureate from 2010-2011. She is the author of Until I Learned What It Meant (Where Are You Press, 2013) and When I’m Not There (self-published, 2016), as well as co-author of [Dis]Connected Volume 1: Poems & Stories of Connection and Otherwise (Central Avenue Publishing, 2018). In 2022, she released her third and fourth books of poetry: Our Synonyms: An Epic from Party Trick Press and VIRAHA from Game Over Books. After attending Swarthmore College, Yena went on to complete a master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School, where she focused on South Asian Religious Traditions. Her research was supported by the Science, Religion, Culture Program and the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Currently, Yena works as the Content Manager at AppSumo. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and loves the Charles River.