Vanessa Zimmer-Powell is a Houston poet and Speech-Language Pathologist. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts in Communication Sciences and Disorders from the University of Texas at Austin. Vanessa was the winner of the 2016 Houston Poetry Fest ekphrastic poetry competition. In 2013 she won a Rick Steve's Haiku Award and received honors at the Austin International Poetry Fest. Her poetry has aired on KPFT, KTRU, Houston Public Radio, and the Rick Steves radio program. Vanessa’s poetry has been published in the Austin International Poetry Festival anthologies; Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems; Weekly Avocet; Blue Hole; Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review; Chaffey Review; Copperfield Review; Ekphrasis; Harbinger Asylum; Houston Poetry Fest Anthologies; San Pedro River Review; the Texas Poetry Calendar; and Untamable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston. Her chapbook, Woman Looks into an Eye, is published by Dancing Girl Press. In January of 2018, her poem, “Aquí” will appear in a collaborative collection of ekphrastic poetry and the photography of Jim Bones.