Malia Collins is the 2019 Idaho Writer in Residence. She has an MA in English from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boise State University. For the last twenty-five years, Ms. Collins has worked as a writer, editor, teacher, and teaching writer. She is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the College of Western Idaho and co-director of the CWI Visiting Writer Series: Writers and Words. She is also a teaching artist with the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and contributing writer to the book in progress, Narrative Thread: Sewn Stories of Refugee Journeys to Idaho, a collaboration between Artisans for Hope and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. For the past five years, she has been a strategies consultant and storytelling and creative writing facilitator for We Choose All of Us, a project of the Idaho Coalition against Sexual and Domestic Violence. She is an award-winning children’s author, fiction and creative nonfiction writer, and is currently working on a memoir about Hawaii and a book about Boise’s public art installations.