Lehua M. Taitano

Lehua M. Taitano (familian Kabesa yan Kuetu) is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of the art collective Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. Her poetry, essays, and Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction have been published internationally, and includes two books of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones—and many chapbooks of poetry, short fiction, and visual art, including Sonoma, Capacity, and  appalachiapacific, which won the Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction.

Taitano has received fellowship support from Submittable and The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. She has served as poetry faculty for the Kundiman Writers’ Retreat, a curatorial council member for Yerba Buena Center for the Art’s Triennial exhibition of contemporary art, and an interdisciplinary artist with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. She is currently the program and community manager at Kearny Street Workshop, where she coordinates APAture, an annual festival of Pacific Islander and Asian American art. Taitano’s work investigates modern Indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.