Core Educators
Petra Salazar (they/them)
MFA in Poetry, MEd in Secondary Education
Petra Salazar is an educator and artist from Northern New Mexico, Indohispano holy ground for environmental activism, philosophy, and art. Petra is interested in embodied and land-based creative practices and the sacred dynamic between artist, art, and audience.
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Petra was a finalist and honorable mention in the 2022 Button Chapbook Contest. Their work has been featured 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.
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 or mutual co-arising; 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.
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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.