Core Educators
Petra Salazar
MFA in Poetry, MEd in Secondary Education
Petra Salazar, with Learning Park WS, is a coyote educator from Rio Arriba, currently residing in Winston-Salem, a Climate Haven — a place projected to remain relatively stable and habitable, with fewer extreme heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and with more reliable water and agricultural resilience.
Salazar devotes her sacred attention and labor to poetry, family, and a creative reuse nonprofit working to make art sustainable and accessible. 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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A former military diesel mechanic turned community arts organizer, Salazar holds an MFA in Poetry from UNC-Greensboro and an M.Ed. from George Washington University. 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.
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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. Her debut book, Harsh Terrain, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. A finalist and honorable mention in the 2022 Button Chapbook Contest, her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Sonora Review, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere.
Pedagogy Statement
I approach education and poetry as healing, liberatory practices that transcend rigid learning and literary spaces. My pedagogy—what I call Coyote Pedagogy—is rooted in adaptability, relational knowledge, and the trickster ethos of border-crossing. I prioritize process over product, dialogue over isolation, and curiosity over prescriptive judgment. Influenced by the pedagogical frameworks of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Maria Montessori, as well as mindfulness and metacognition—what I call “breaking the fourth wall in educational settings”—I emphasize fostering “live questions,” cultivating personal connections to material, and co-creating learning environments that embrace uncertainty and transformation. Coyote Pedagogy is a way of thinking and teaching that resists rigid authority and embraces the in-between spaces where real learning happens.
I am committed to reimagining education through guerrilla publishing, the undercommons—the informal, often invisible networks of mutual aid sustaining social and intellectual life—and alternative learning communities. These movements challenge traditional schooling models that track learners, prioritize tradition over innovation and equity, abuse credentialing power, and commodify knowledge at the expense of wisdom, love, and land-based practices. Like the coyote, who survives through resourcefulness and movement, Coyote Pedagogy is about navigating these landscapes creatively, bridging past and future, structure and improvisation, resistance and survival.
As an educator, I see my role as a facilitator rather than an authority. I prepare the learning environment, curate texts and media, affirm and encourage curiosity, ask meaningful questions, and help students recognize patterns, synthesize ideas, and forge connections across disciplines and lived experiences. Coyote Pedagogy resists the rigidity of institutional gatekeeping and instead cultivates a practice of wandering, questioning, and shapeshifting in pursuit of deeper understanding, critical thinking, and self-determined learning. It is a pedagogy of movement, trickster wisdom, and collective survival.
Contributing Educators
Francisco Gallegos (he/him)
PhD in Philosophy
Born in Albuquerque, NM, Francisco Gallegos 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.
