Rae Paris is from Carson, California with roots extending to New Orleans. Her writing, research, teaching, and service are layered in land, memory, resistance, Black, Indigenous, and Brown futures, and love. Her work has been supported by an NEA Literature Fellowship and writing residencies from the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Hambidge Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA).

Her poem "The Forgetting Tree" was selected as Best of the Net 2013. Her short story “The Girl Who Ate Her Own Skin” was a recommended story in the 2009 O. Henry Prize Stories, and her collection was a finalist for the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction. Her book The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory (Wayne State University Press, 2017) remembers her father’s life and death within an assemblage of past and present racial violence and resistance to terror in the United States.