Petra Salazar is a poet, educator, and culture worker from the Upper Rio Grande Valley. A former military diesel mechanic turned community arts organizer, Salazar holds an MFA in Poetry from UNC Greensboro, where she was a Fred Chappell Fellow, and an M.Ed. from George Washington University. Her debut book, Harsh Terrain, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. An award winning essayist and an honorable mention in the 2022 Button Chapbook Contest, her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Sonora Review, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere.

 

Salazar devotes her sacred attention and labor to sharing el oro del barrio and advancing Latinx Philosophy. Though she now lives with her family in North Carolina, her heart — and her work — remain rooted in the high desert of Aztlán.​

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Salazar’s writing maps coyote identity, ancestral memory, and sacred geographies of the U.S. Southwest. She writes to metabolize loss, bridge past and future, and cultivate new possibilities for identity and belonging in a modern world shaped by rigid binaries and policed borders. Salazar’s perspective is shaped by lived experience—as a labor activist, educator, Army National Guard diesel mechanic, military conscientious objector, certified master gardener, herbalism apprentice, and Tai chi and mindfulness practitioner.