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Core Faculty

Petra Salazar (they/them)

MFA in Poetry, MEd in Secondary Education

Petra Salazar is a white (tres)passing "coyote" (regional term for an indohispano/anglo racial identity) from Española, New Mexico. Petra is an educator at a Montessori school and at Philopoetics.com. They were a finalist and honorable mention in the 2022 Button Chapbook Contest. Petra's work has been published or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Sonora Review, The Southampton Review, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere.
 

Petra holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from UNC-G, where they graduated as a Fred Chappell Fellow. They also hold a Master of Education degree & a Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Management from George Washington University. Petra has had additional formative educational experiences as an Army National Guard diesel mechanic, military conscientious objector to the Iraq War, labor activist, community organizer, higher ed administrator, certified master gardener, herbalism apprentice, and mindfulness and Tai chi practitioner.

Petra Salazar

Pedagogy Statement

I consider education and poetry as healing, liberatory practices that occur both inside and outside traditional learning and literary spaces. I value process over product and dialogue over isolation. My teaching approach is informed by my commitments to: racial, gender, and economic justice, mindfulness; the pedagogical theories of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Maria Montessori; metacognition or what I call "breaking the fourth wall in educational settings;" fostering "live questions" or personal connections to the material; self-reflection; co-directed learning; and dwelling in states of curiosity and wonder rather than states of competitive, authoritative, and prescriptive judgment.

Through my work, I'm excited to contribute to movements in guerrilla publishing; the undercommons (the informal, unauthorized, and invisible safety net or mutual aid networks under-girding the social, public, and private sectors); and alternative learning communities that challenge traditional hierarchical schooling, which tracks learners, values tradition over innovation and equity, abuses credentialing power, and commodifies and weaponizes knowledge at the cost of wisdom, love, empathy, and oral and embodied knowledge traditions.

In my role as an educator, I prepare the learning environment, curate texts and media, encourage and affirm curiosity and expression, ask questions, and help identify patterns, synthesize ideas, and make connections.

Contributing Educators

Francisco Gallegos (he/him)

PhD in Philosophy

Born in Albuquerque, NM, Francisco specializes in phenomenology, philosophy of emotions, and Latin American philosophy. After completing his PhD at Georgetown University, he worked for a year as a philosophical consultant in Silicon Valley. He is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University.

Francisco Gallegos
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