she, her
Humanities Division
Associate Professor of Creative-Making
Faculty
Remote work location
On Sabbatical until Winter 2026
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
fahima ife (b. California, 1983) is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She practices an embodied poetics and writes from the wild feminine. She writes about decolonial intimacy, sensuality, nature, metaphysics, spirituality, beauty, and healing.
She completed her Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of Wisconsin Madison's School of Education with an emphasis in Languages, Literacies, & Cultures and a minor in English Rhetoric. Her teaching is an opportunity for her to be of service to her students, to share what she has learned about living/embodying continuous creative practice, and to co-create ways of experiencing the creative process together. For the past 16 years, fahima has taught in numerous settings. From 2016-2022, she was an assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University. Since 2022, she is associate professor of Creative-Making at the University of California Santa Cruz in the Division of Humanities in the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies where she teaches classes on creative practice, process, poetry and poetics.
She is the author of Septet for the Luminous Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) which was a finalist for the 44th annual Northern California Book Award and the 2024 Big Other Book Award, the chapbook abalone (Albion Books, 2023), Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021) winner of the Duke University Press First Book Award, and other poems and essays that appear in the Kenyon Review, mercury firs, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Brooklyn Rail, Interim, Air/Light, Poetry Daily, American Academy of Poets Poem-A-Day, and other places. Recent performances include: Solarities 5 at Duke University, The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, The Museum of the African Diaspora, The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, The Poetry Foundation, Fugue Journal, The Poetry Society, and Brooklyn Poets.
She lives in a village on the northern Monterey Bay coast in California.
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.
"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)