Aurora Levins Morales is a cuir, feminist, disabled and chronically ill Boricua-Ashkenazi (Puerto Rican Jewish) poet, essayist and visual artist. She is a movement elder and sixth generation radical. The author of nine books, her writing is widely taught and anthologized. She lives in Maricao, Puerto Rico where she stewards 34 acres of subtropical rainforest, gardens and writes.

Levins Morales was in residence in 2005 (Pre-Katrina) and returned as an Adaptations resident in 2018. During her Adaptations residency, she worked to produce a prose poetry book and podcast series exploring the connections between the ecological and social histories of the Mississippi River and the Caribbean Sea, as well as the shared experiences of New Orleans and Puerto Rico of hurricane devastation and disaster capitalism, drawing from community story circles, and extending into visions for just and resilient futures. She will return again as a Self as Universe Resident in 2025 to work on a prose poetry book and public installation of digital art and fermented substances, entitled Ferment. It will examine pesticides as a cause of epilepsy (eco-colonial seizure disorder), linked to epidemics, borders, genocide, war and the breaking of ecological community; and explores fermentation as a response, offering bioremediation of soil and body, and restoring interspecies collaboration, a communal healing practice and metaphor of resistance.

“For me, the time at the Studio was a turning point in a lifetime of writing. In the midst of struggling with the perpetual self-doubts and uneven leaps forward of every artist’s life, I came to a place of clear certainty about the power and trustworthiness of what I do. I had a writer’s birthday. The green, shaded, owl-crossed pond, and the long, wide, sunlit elevation of the levee, have become touchstone images for a kind of inner balance I found there. The river that haunted my imagination now flows across my desk, leaving rich deposits of poetry I know I will work for years.” – Aurora Levins Morales

For more on Aurora Levins Morales, visit her Patreon!