About
Petra Salazar is a poet, educator, and culture worker from the Española Valley in Northern New Mexico. A former diesel mechanic turned community arts organizer, she holds an MFA in Poetry from UNC Greensboro and an M.Ed from George Washington University. Her writing explores coyote identity, ancestral memory, and the emotional and spiritual terrain of the U.S. Southwest. Her debut poetry collection, Harsh Terrain, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. Currently, she is at work on elementary, a poetry collection examining queer aftermath, apocalyptic emotion, and the polycrisis. Alongside her poetry, Salazar is developing Coyote Pedagogy, a book on adaptable, land-based, justice-oriented approaches to education. Rooted in the traditions of resolana and radical pedagogy, this work reimagines learning as relational knowledge and creative resistance.
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. She writes to metabolize loss, bridge past and future, and cultivate new possibilities for identity and belonging in a world of rigid binaries and policed borders. Salazar moonlights for a creative reuse nonprofit where she works to make art more 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.
