Kamala PlattKamala Platt, Ph.D., MFA is an author, artist, independent scholar and contingent professor living in South Texas and at The Meadowlark Center, Kansas. She currently teaches creative writing, Chicana Poetry, Environmental Justice Poetics and Pen Projct Prison Teaching for the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in Arizona State University's Online Program. She has shared her visual art and poetry widely, often in community arts and cultural centers and at conferences. Last year's highlight exhibit was Bird Island Photo Diptich: I. Summer Pachanga & II. Halcyon Hellscape afterAdvent Attacks in Emotional Numbness: The impact of war on the human psyche and ecosystems at Platform 3, Tehran, Iran, and Online, July 2020 - January 2021. She also participated in Zoom poetry readings in conjunction with Stone in the Stream, Sierra Club, Bihl Haus, and more.Through green rascuache lifeways, Kamala searches borderlands for footholds of dignity & well-being (resistance to walls, injustices, militarisms, 'isms, ecological disrespect...) amidst a feverish planet's crises. Her current scholarship shares women's environmental justice poetics creating a lens through which to understand visions of a sustainable future. She is preparing her manuscript environmental Justice Poetics: Cultural Representations of Environmental Racism from Chicanas and Women in India for publication with De Gruyter in Berlin. Her Westside Barrio, San Antonio home and nearby Garden of Good Trouble host native habitat, garden, and orchard offering seasonal produce: limones, loquats, nopalitos, tunas, figs, and pomegranites to share; a library andstudio hold books & art. Family roots in ecology and human rights and a cross-cultural childhood among Mennonites in Kansas, & family friends/coworkers in Orissa (Odisha), India, provides foundation. In recent years, Fuerza Unida, Esperanza Center for Peace & Justice, Texas Master Naturalists, Cultural Capital, Climate Reality Leadership and Texas Women Farmers' HolisticManagement and Native Plant, Bonsai, and Cactus & Xerophyte groups have built her knowledge and she currently works in solidarity with groups supporting immigrants and other marginalized and displaced communities including SA Stands, and San Antonio Coalition for Police Accountability.Kamala has held fellowships with Center for the Study of Women and Society, OU (Women, Science & the Sacred), Feminist Research Institute (UNM) and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center (Gateways) in San Antonio. She holds an MFA in poetry (BGSU, Ohio), an MA in Interdisciplinary Arts(Columbia College, Chicago), a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (UT, Austin) and an undergraduate degree (Art, International Development, Religion), Bethel College, Kansas. Read More Read Less
