My art is a practice of retrieval, reanimation, and re-presentation of the parts of ourselves lost in the wake of trauma.
Poetry is the sound, the feel, of those missing | mis-seen parts— raw, unapologetic, found, free.
About
.CHISARAOKWU. is an Igbo American transdisciplinary poet artist, scholar, writer, performer, health futurist, and a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Inspired by her love of history, dreamscapes, the environment, quantum physics, and all things Africa(n)|(in)diaspora, she weaves images, textures, and text to create poems. Her work has been honored with awards and fellowships from the California Arts Council, MacDowell, Cave Canem, Vermont Studio Center, Anaphora Arts, Ucross and Headlands Center for the Arts, among other honors. 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 words 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. From 2010-2017, she served as a US Commissioner to UNESCO. She is currently working on two poetry collections and a novel.
RECENT SHOUT OUTS
2025 Literary Women’s Harriet Williams Emerging Writer
2024 Honorable Mention, Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize, Beloit Poetry Journal
2024 Finalist, Frontier Open Poetry Prize
2023 Finalist, Indiana Review 1/2K Poetry Prize
2023 Honorable Mention, Evaristo Poetry Prize (formerly Brunel African International Poetry Prize), African Poetry Book Fund
2023 Sonia Sanchez Poetry Fellow at MacDowell, The Poetry Foundation