Poetry and the Senses Fellows

Professor Hernandez-Avila is Niimiipuu/Nez Perce, of Chief Joseph’s band, enrolled on the Colville Reservation, Washington, on her mother’s side, and Tejana (and Mexican Indigenous) on her father’s side. A scholar, poet, and visual artist, her research and teaching focus on contemporary Indigenous literature of the Americas, and Indigenous religious traditions. She is a Ford Foundation Fellow at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels, and a member of the Society of Senior Ford Fellows. She is one of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies...

Sarah Hennessey is Nimíipuu and she is a poet, performer, playwright, and youth empowerment theater practitioner. Her work highlights the symbiosis of storytelling and language reclamation. By integrating her penchant for literature and performance into her educational outreach, Sarah infuses her instruction with not just interdisciplinary pedagogy, but also both traditional and contemporary storytelling techniques. Her work has been published in literary journals such as Yellow Medicine Review and Pork Belly Press. Her first short play Weet’u...

Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based writer, educator, and artist. Maurya’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and appears or is forthcoming in multiple journals, including Inverted Syntax, Chestnut Review, Tupelo Quarterly, little somethings press, and an anthology, “The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry.” Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on Black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to wonderment. Maurya was recently chosen by Jericho Brown as a runner-up in Southern Humanities Review’s 2021...

Fede thinks about dragons, wings, wishes, coincidences, spirals, knots, seeds, breath. They’re only at the beginning of their journey with poetry and the arts at large–an exciting prospect. Their poetry is informed by their queer-chinese-latine identity and they find that art-making is a restorative process. They always emerge from a project having pulled out something they could never quite grab at before. Fede loves love, being undone, and a good string. For the new year they plan to do a bird watching Big Year, learn balance, and be in conversation.

Fede was an...