Ilish Stone (James Ilish Sanchez) was born in the naval base of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This site would later be home to one of the most notorious United States prisons to ever exist. After migrating, much of his life was devoted to forming peace with a tragic version of the city that enticed Pulitzer Prize poet William Carlos Williams: Paterson, New Jersey. Author, researcher, poet, and fiction writer, Ilish Stone currently attends the anthropology department of Montclair State University and is the recent recipient of the 2019 Antoinette C. Bigel Award for a linguistic study on silence. A postmodern magical realism writer, Ilish Stone lives to identify with the passing, ordinary beauties that at once go by.