Campus Directory

Pronouns she, her

Division Humanities Division

Department/College/Unit Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Title Associate Professor of Black Aesthetics & Poetics

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Web Site

Primary Office Location Remote work location

Mail Stop Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Biography, Education and Training

Poet, professor, and editor, fahima ife is the author of Maroon Choreography, featured in the New York Times Book Review, and Septet for the Luminous Ones a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and Big Other Book Award. In her work, she draws on her own cultural background and life experiences to heal deep legacy pain. Her practice is somatic. She writes from the wild feminine, the intuitive, instinctive aspects of her womanhood which drives her full creative force. Blending lyrical beauty with profound emotional resonance, her poetry is known for its evocative and deeply introspective essence and often explores themes of identity, ancestry, intimacy, spirituality, nature, personal transformation, and is celebrated for its style, emotional depth, lyrical strength, innovation, and its ability to nurture connection and understanding.

With Ian U Lockaby she co-created and co-edits the indie micropress LUCIUS for established and emerging high-frequency poetry and poetics.

She was born and raised in Southern California (the Inland Empire) in a mystical, mixed-race, working-class Indigenous family whose ancestry originates in Benin, Nigeria, Mali, Europe, Cameroon, Senegal, and First Nations before chattel enslavement in the Americas and Caribbean. She lives in Santa Cruz County.

She received her B.A. in Psychology from California State University San Bernardino in 2005. Her M.A.T. from Emory University in 2010. And a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction from the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. From 2016-2022 she was an assistant professor at Louisiana State University in the Department of English. In 2022 she joined the University of California Santa Cruz as an associate professor of Black Aesthetics & Poetics in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (and is affiliated with Literature) in the Humanities. She is also affiliated with Music in the Arts.

She is currently working on three new books: poetry, stories, a novel.

Teaching Interests

I teach creative classes on global African music and performance, poetry and poetics, the interplay of arts-activism in creative making via the historical and ongoing projects of Black Studies, Black Feminisms, and Indigenous Transnational Feminisms. All of my classes introduce students to active, experiential, embodied, and imaginative methods of creative process, creative practice, and creative myth-making as practical tools of justice. 

Selected Publications

"from BLUE VIPERS" (mercury firs, 2025)

Septet for the Luminous Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 2024)

"3 poems" (The Brooklyn Rail, 2024)

abalone (Albion Books, 2023)

"alchemical sirens" (The Kenyon Review, 2023)

"communicado, two sips" (Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, 2023)

"our general banality" (American Academy of Poets, Poem-A-Day, 2022)

"a run // on black study" (Research in the Teaching of English, 2022)

"grief aesthetics" (liquid blackness, 2022)

"i believe in echoes" (ASAP/J, 2021)

Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021)

"skilled black hands braid geometric insignia as poetry" (Air/Light, 2021)

"2 poems" (Interim Poetics, 2020)

Courses CRES 113: Music and Performance
CRES 183: A Black Lyric
CRES 222: Experimental Language Poetry
CRES 190A: Critical Race Feminism
CRES 68: Approaches to Black Studies