Principal Faculty

Fahima Ife
  • Pronouns she, her
  • Title
    • Associate Professor
  • Division Humanities Division
  • Department
    • Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
  • Email
  • Website
  • Mail Stop Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
  • 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

Biography, Education and Training

fahima ife (b. California, 1983) is an American language poet and essayist practicing in experimental traditions. She is obsessed with sound, movement, atmosphere, community, abstraction, ecstasy, and she writes about intimacy, sensuality, and beauty as it relates to nature and metaphysics. 

 

She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin Madison's School of Education with an emphasis in Languages, Literacies, & Cultures and a minor in English Rhetoric. She is the author of Septet for the Luminous Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), abalone: anima, animus (Albion Books, 2023), Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021), and other poems and essays that appear in the Kenyon ReviewObsidian: Literature & Arts in the African DiasporaThe Brooklyn RailInterimAir/Light Magazine, Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the DiasporaPoetry Dailyliquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studiesAmerican Academy of Poets Poem-A-Day, and other places. Recent performances include: The Poetry FoundationThe Library of CongressThe Museum of the African DiasporaThe Center for African American Poetry and PoeticsThe Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has been written about in the New York TimesThe Poetry FoundationFugue JournalThe Poetry Society, and Brooklyn Poets. With poet Ian U Lockaby, she co-edits the poetry micropress & chapbook series, LUCIUS.

 

As associate professor of Black Aesthetics & Poetics at the University of California Santa Cruz's Division of Humanities in the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, she teaches creative classes on African Diasporic music and performance, experimental language poetry and poetics, contemporary art futures, Black Studies, and Black Feminist methods. 

 

She lives on the central California coast where she practices a yoga lifestyle grounded in daily rituals of communal love, joy, and peace. She is currently at work on a three-book prose series on experimental poetics.

Selected Publications

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)