Summer Awad is a second-year CWE student from Knoxville, Tennessee. Having started her writing journey as a spoken word poet, Summer has branched out into playwriting, nonfiction, and page poetry, and she is grateful to be able to do all of the above at Iowa State. Her writing explores themes of race, ethnicity, gender, diaspora, migration, identity, and place. Her semi-autobiographical play, WALLS: A Play for Palestine, was produced at The New York International Fringe Festival in 2016. Her poetry has appeared in Writers Resist, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and Exposition Review. Prior to coming to Iowa State, Summer spent four years working in refugee resettlement. This led her to teach an honors seminar on refugee resettlement in Spring 2022 in addition to her courses in Speech Comm 212; she hopes to teach in honors again in the future.