Jumi Bello is not your traditional writer. She grew up in the Washington DC suburbs and went to college in the Midwest. She spent the majority of her twenties living in Taiwan and mainland China, and returned to the United States to study fiction at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her work has received support from the University of Iowa, StoryStudio Chicago, Corporeal Writing, Tin House and most recently, the Black Mountain Institute. She is an incoming BMI PhD-fellow in creative nonfiction at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Her debut novel, THE LEAVING, is coming out from Riverhead Books in summer 2022. She writes about mental illness, race and social institutions. Her writing fights to show the marginalized that our stories matter. This world is ours too.