about

Born in the sagebrush— La Poète was an artist and naturalist when her mother still dressed her in overalls. Writing in the dust under juniper trees and the mourning of losses cultivated a parched humor and Irish-Catholic surrealism. At seventeen, she moved to “The Biggest Little City in the World” to play trumpet professionally while studying music, literature, and sciences of the occidental variety.

At home in the mountains, she has abided in northern California, where the Sierra Nevada mountains meet the Cascades. As a firefighter and fire lookout, she spent ten years living off-grid atop mountain peaks and writing from a typewriter in a house in the forest. As an intellectual, she is dedicated to research through sociocultural anthropology.

As a writer and musician– she has recited and performed original words and music at open-mics and performances in the American West. She also interprets American folk music with the aid of coffee and whisky. So far, her poetry has appeared in Haggard & Halloo, the Cosumnes River Journal, and local and online publications.

A person of humanity, she has worked to support indigenous sovereignty through traditional ecology, especially Native American Mountain Maidu communities of Northern California. Now, she has returned to live in the small provincial city of Kigoma in western Tanzania of equatorial Africa. La poète is a Fulbright Student Scholar Alumna, and researches the diffusion of music culture through the senses and experience at the Tanzanian/DR Congo border at Lake Tanganyika.