"Grace Under Fire" (Arvind Nandakumar)

Arvind Nandakumar is no one of consequence. A child of Forward Arts located in Baton Rouge, La, Arvind has competed at the International Brave New Voices Festival. He has also competed at the 2016 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. In 2017 Arvind won the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship. Arvind is a poet of color on the autism spectrum and sometimes writes poems about other stuff too, like being a 1.25-1.75 Indian-something immigrant who never stops moving around. When he’s not writing poems, Arvind spends his days as a student at UC Berkeley studying Microbial Biology, organizing really awesome poetry events and coding for fun.