Author of The Opposite of Breathing is Cement (2023), Icess Fernández Rojas is a Houston-based educator, writer, and former journalist.   A graduate of Goddard College MFA, her work has appeared in Queen Mob’s Teh Book, Rabble Lit, Minerva Rising, and the Feminine Collective anthology Notes from Humanity.

Her poem “Warm Hands in Cold Rooms” was selected for PraiseSong for the People, a Texas Poet Laureate initiative. She has been awarded fellowships and workshops through VONA/Voices, Dos Brujas, Kimbilio, and the Yale Writers Workshop. In 2025, she was part of the Artist INC Houston Fellowship cohort and was named a finalist for the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for her project exploring the revision process of Gabriel García Márquez.

Her work explores identity, memory, resilience, and cultural inheritance. She is currently working on her second poetry collection.

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