Avant-Garde Poetics, Translation, and Ecofeminism
Sarah María Medina studies and translates Avant-Garde poetry written in Spanish, with a focus on texts concerned with ecofeminism. Her interdisciplinary research interests include Avant-Garde poetics, anti-colonial translation theory, ecofeminism, queer ecology, and feminist, queer and affect theory. She is currently translating the Uruguayan poet, Marosa di Giorgio´s La Falena. The collection of poems function as allegories for specific acts of violence (both the personal and communal), yet also extend beyond allegory, building an alternative historical narrative of a country's survival after the civic-military dictatorship in Uruguay. Her writing and translations have been published in Poetry Magazine, Asymptote, Prelude, Black Warrior Review, Poetry NW, and elsewhere. Her work is also found in Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018), and in Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, centering LGBTQIA+ voices in a collection of contemporary nature poetry (Autumn House Press, 2022). She is the recipient of an ARTIST UP Grant LAB, a Jack Straw Writer fellowship, a Caldera AIR, and the Black Warrior Review poetry prize. Medina received her Bachelor of Arts in Comparative History of Ideas at University of Washington in Seattle, a Master of Fine Arts in poetry at Washington University, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in the International Writers Track in the Comparative Literature department at Washington University in St. Louis. Since arriving at Washington University, she has received a teaching fellowship in creative writing and has taught classes in introduction to poetry in the English department. Additionally, she has been an assistant instructor in World-wide Translation: Language, Culture, Technology, an interdisciplinary translation class in Global Studies and Comparative Literature. Furthermore, she is interested in archival work, and recently curated an exhibit, Wherein I Am: Highlights from the Aaron Coleman Papers, in the Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, highlighting Coleman´s poetry, as well as his study of poetry and translation of the African Diaspora in the Americas. She has also been a summer fellow for the Mellon Seminar on Theorizing Bodily Autonomy: Gender, Sexuality and Coloniality, and is a recipient of a Divided City Graduate summer research fellowship, focusing on the body poetics of Nahui Olin & Anita Brenner in Mexico City´s Avant Garde, and the relationship between the body and nature within these works of art, framing the works within a decolonial, ecofeminist, and queer urban ecologist lens.
