Hello, my name is Maria-kyle Denius and I am a writer first and foremost. It is my passion and my soul. My father, before his passing, introduced me to my lifelong love of reading books and poetry and he encouraged me to write whatever my heart desired. He even went out of his way to supply me with journals, quills, a computer and even at one point a classical typewriter he purchased at a flee market. I attended Stivers School for The Arts and graduated with a High School Diploma, spending my entire high school years studying for Creative Writing. While there I wrote poetry, stories, journalism. I learned about worldbuilding and how to tie themes to settings and diction/verbiage to belief and passion. And I also discovered both my sexuality and gender identity while attending Stivers. I met a group of people who helped me discover that I was pansexual and, later, that I was trans. While I struggled, and still struggle, with a conservative family who finds my identity uncouth and against everything they stand for, I've always had my friends and the LGBTQ community to lean on in these difficult times. I have struggled to find social acceptance from some people, understanding from many more and even proper medical care for myself. Especially being low income, getting the therapy and medications that I need both to pursue my gender identity and to treat health issues has proven a stressful dilemma. I have struggled with dealing with the ongoing politics, both within my home state and on a federal level, and I have struggled to put myself out there and be truly prideful of the person I am and the person I want to be. And all of these things, my LGBTQ identity, my struggles and my love for my friends has made me all the more passionate about writing. It has given me all the power I need to write stories that reach down from my soul and flow out on the page with golden tinged ink. My poetry has begun to focus on my inner struggles for self-discovery and my outer-struggles of finding acceptance from others while my stories have grown more bold, more prideful and more ready than ever to tackle subjects near and dear to my heart including but not limited to Trans Rights, Civil Rights, shared human compassion and the shared struggles of the human condition. In the end, I am a writer through and through, and my only goal in life is to create something lasting for a community I love and hold dear to my heart.