Amber West

Amber West is a poet, educator, public arts and humanities producer, and feminist scholar. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Calyx, Puppetry International, The Feminist Wire, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Furies: A Poetry Anthology of Women Warriors, and The Routledge Companion to Puppetry & Material Performance. She co-founded the Alphabet Arts collective, for which she created and directed the Puppets & Poets festival in NYC from 2011-2015. More recently, she created and directed Whitmania, the largest commemoration of Walt Whitman’s bicentennial west of the Mississippi. West has published two poetry collections, Daughter Eraser (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Hen & God (The Word Works, 2017), and performed her poetry and “puppet poems” nationally. She teaches writing at the University of California, Los Angeles.