Roxanne Naseem Rashedi was raised in the Greater Bay Area. She teaches Critical Thinking and Writing courses at Santa Clara University. Roxanne has been awarded fellowships and scholarships, including UC Berkeley's W.H. Hill Award and has been accepted into numerous writing workshops, including Tin House and VONA. She was recently granted the First Annual Generations Literary Journal Emerging Writer Scholarship to attend the VONA workshop at UC Berkeley (June 2012). Roxanne was also invited to lead a yoga and poetry infused workshop at the Los Dos Brujas Writers' Workshop (June 2012.) She has an M.A. from Georgetown University and a B.A. in English from the University of California Berkeley, where she was a graduate of the English Honors Program. At Georgetown University, Roxanne was appointed as the Graduate Writing Fellow at the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship and she was also a teaching assistant in the Department of American Studies. Recently, her work has appeared in the Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies Journal, UCLA's eScholarship Repository Project, and her short story "My First Power Yoga Class" was recently accepted for the online publication in APIARY. Roxanne is currently working on a collection of short stories.