Brianda Castro immigrated to the United States from Mexico at the age of nine to join her mother in San Francisco. As a student in the Bay Area, she interned with the Young Artists at Work with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and volunteered with Visions Montana (a community service program that works with indigenous people). She has published a poem in A Celebration of Young Poets, and most recently an essay in Seeing Through the Fog, A Gateway to San Francisco. Brianda began attending UC Riverside in Fall 2009.