Kamala Platt

Kamala Platt teaches course in Creative Writing, Ethnic American, Chicanx Literature, and Environmental Justice Poetics through ASU Online for the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in Arizona State University’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. She previously taught at UTPA (now UTRGV) in far south Texas, where she helped initiate an Environmental Studies Program and currently lives and works on San Antonio’s Westside and spends teaching downtime at the Meadowlark Center in Kansas. 

Her current, interdisciplinary, creative and scholarly work feeding her pedagogical development, responds to environmental, economic, social, and cultural crises, in particular, borderland militarization and domination, and environmental and climate justice concerns. She publishes and performs in scholarly, community and creative venues, that include an online presence.

Her two collections—"Weedslovers: Ten Years in the Shadow of September" (2014) and "On the Line" (2010)— continue to speak to the current “time of great, great hate,” by studying nuances of vantage points on current threats and historicizing those current concerns. For example, resistance to the border wall-building in Texas's RGV, a decade ago, offers cautionary tales against current wall-building. Her work documents and exemplifies a poetics of crisis and of resistance by responding to calamities, violence and injustice experienced in marginalized parts of the region and the planet.