Bio

Adela Najarro is the author of four poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over, My Childrens, a chapbook that includes teaching resources, and Volcanic Interruptions, a chapbook that includes Janet Trenchard’s artwork. 

 With My Childrens she hopes to bring poetry into the classroom so that students can explore creative writing, identity, and what it means to be Latinx in US society.  In Volcanic Interruptions, Najarro’s poems and Trenchard’s paintings dialog about the feminine as power and life force, where volatility is strength and symbolized through the theme of vibrant earth energy. 

Her extended family’s emigration from Nicaragua to San Francisco began in the 1940’s and concluded in the eighties when the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area. She currently calls Santa Cruz, California, home.

She teaches at Cabrillo College, and is the English instructor for the Puente Project, a program designed to support Latinidad in all its aspects, while preparing community college students to transfer to four-year colleges and universities. In the fall, she teaches an online "Introduction to Creative Writing," and in the spring semester, she teaches a poetry workshop at Cabrillo College where students explore personal voice and social justice through poetry and spoken word. 

She holds a doctorate in literature and creative writing from Western Michigan University, as well as an M.F.A. from Vermont College, and is widely published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. 

Her poetry appears in the University of Arizona Press anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, and she has published poems in numerous journals, including Porter Gulch Review, Acentos Review, BorderSenses, Feminist Studies, Puerto del Sol, Nimrod International Journal of Poetry & Prose, Notre Dame Review, Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere.