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. An established writer, author of nine books, whose work is widely taught and anthologized, she is also an emerging visual artist focusing on digital collage. She lives in Maricao, Puerto Rico where she stewards 34 acres of subtropical rainforest, writes, makes art and gardens. Levins Morales was in residence in 2005 (Pre-Katrina) and returned as an Adaptations resident in 2018 and a Self as Universe resident in 2024-2025. During her Adaptations residency, she worked on a prose poetry book exploring the connections between the ecological and social histories of the Mississippi River and the Caribbean Sea, which was published in 2019 as Silt: Prose Poems.

She returned in October 2024 and will do the second half of her residency in October 2025. Her current project, Ferment, is a blend of digital collage and prose poetic narrative that starts by examining pesticides as a cause of her own epilepsy (eco-colonial seizure disorder). It then spins out in an exploration of chemicals of control, agricultural and military, linked to famines and epidemics, borders and genocides, warfare and the breaking of ecological community. The work also celebrates a vision of interspecies alliance, specifically with bacteria, holding up fermentation as a powerful alternative to control, that offers bioremediation of body and soil, and a metaphor of resistance, and ties this web of harm and hope to three anchoring locations, Puerto Rico, Louisiana and Viet Nam.