Deborah J. Hunter, a native Tulsan, is a poet, spoken word artist, essayist, actor, teaching artist, workshop facilitator and social justice activist. She was selected as a 2020 Greenwood Art Project grant recipient. She was presented with a Woman of the Year Pinnacle Award in 2018, the Jingle Feldman Artist Award in 2000, and was a 2013 Oklahoma Poet Laureate finalist. Her work has been published in literary journals, magazines, anthologies and other printed media. She was awarded a Tulsa Performing Arts Center grant in 2005 and again in 2011 to present her one-woman performance piece in poetic monologues, Amazons, Gypsies and Wandering Minstrels, a significant and timely message about women living with trauma. A staunch and longtime advocate and educator on issues pertaining to mental illness and homelessness, Hunter’s chapter, “Violence and the Homeless Population: Perpetrators or Victims?” appears in the academic series, Violence and Abuse in Society: Understanding a Global Crisis (Dr. Angela Browne-Miller, Editor). Her most recent essay “Salvation,” appears in the anthology, Voices from the Heartland-Volume II, which has been selected as a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award finalist.