Mari L'Esperance is a poet, writer, and editor who was born in Kobe, Japan to a Japanese mother and a French Canadian-New Englander father and raised in the Pacific Rim. Her publications include The Darkened Temple (winner of a Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry - U. of Nebraska Press), Begin Here (winner of a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize), and Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine (co-edited with Tomás Q. Morín - Prairie Lights Books / U. of Iowa Press). A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where she was a New York Times Company Foundation Creative Writing Fellow, Mari also holds an MA in Counseling Psychology and a BA in Journalism.