Cantrice Janelle Penn is a writer, anti-colonial copyeditor, linguist, and artist whose upbringing was shaped by splintered tongues, lottery dream books, and the steady waters of the Powhatan River in Shocquohocan. They are the founder, creator and editor of Queer Black Editing, a language services hub for the people.

Their short story and novel excerpt, "The Orange Line," won the 2016 Firefly Ridge Literary Magazine Award, and was selected by storySouth as a 2016 Million Writers Notable Story.

CJ is a VONA Fellow and a former Writer-In-Residence at Weymouth Center for the Arts, and has served as a panel judge for the Creative Writing Awards at Salem College. Their writing has appeared in several publications, including Foglifter, Kweli, As/Us, Apogee, and After Ferguson, In Solidarity (Mourning Glory Publishing, 2015).

They hold a degree in languages from George Mason University and a certificate in editing from University of California, Berkeley Extension. CJ is developing a poetry collection and a full-length work of fiction.