.CHISARAOKWU. is an Igbo American transdisciplinary poet artist, actor and writer, and a 2023 California Arts Council Artist Fellow. Inspired by her love of history, dreamscapes, the environment, quantum physics, and all things Africa(n)|(in)diaspora, her work has been honored with awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem, Vermont Studio Center, Anaphora Arts, Ucross and Headlands Center for the Arts. She is an alum of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program and the 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop. Nominated for Best of Net (Poetry; 2019, 2020, 2021), Best New Poets (2022), and Best New Small Fiction (2022), her works have appeared in academic and literary journals including Transition, Obsidian, midnight&indigo, The Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine. Her debut visual art work is featured in Michigan Quarterly Review’s Spring 2024 issue, African Cartographies edited by Chris Abani. She earned her BA in History from Stanford University, MD from Duke University School of Medicine, MSPH from UNC Gilling School of Global Public Health, and certification in Global Mental Health & Trauma from Harvard School of Public Health’s Refugee Trauma Program. She is a retired pediatrician and an alum of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University where her research focused on adverse childhood experiences, mental health and spirituality, and community-based participatory research projects. She is currently working on two poetry collections and a novel.

Recent Accolades

2024 Ralph & Florence Armellino Fellow, Art Center Padula, Italy

Honorable Mentions, 2024 Beloit Poetry Journal Chad Walsh Poetry Prize

Honorable Mention, 2023 Evaristo Poetry Prize (formerly Brunel International African Poetry Prize)

Fellow, 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Award

Fellow, 2023 Sonia Sanchez Poetry Fellowship (The POETRY Foundation/MacDowell)

Finalist, 2023 Indiana Review 1/2K Poetry Prize 

Longlist, 2023 Frontier Open Poetry Prize