Campus Directory

Pronouns she, her

Division Humanities Division

Department/College/Unit Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Title Associate Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Web Site

Primary Office Location Remote work location

Mail Stop Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Biography, Education and Training

fahima ife (b. California, 1983) is an American language poet and essayist practicing in experimental traditions. She is obsessed with sound, movement, atmosphere, community, abstraction, ecstasy, and she writes about intimacy, sensuality, and beauty as it relates to nature and metaphysics. 

She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin Madison's School of Education with an emphasis in Languages, Literacies, & Cultures and a minor in English Rhetoric. She is the author of Septet for the Luminous Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), abalone (Albion Books, 2023), Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021), and other poems and essays that appear in the Kenyon Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Brooklyn Rail, Interim, Air/Light Magazine, Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, Poetry Daily, liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies, American Academy of Poets Poem-A-Day, and other places. Recent performances include: Solarities 5 at Duke University, The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, The Museum of the African Diaspora, The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, The Poetry Foundation, Fugue Journal, The Poetry Society, and Brooklyn Poets. 

As associate professor of Black Aesthetics & Poetics at the University of California Santa Cruz's Division of Humanities in the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, she teaches creative classes on African Diasporic music and performance, experimental poetry and poetics, Black Studies, and Black Feminist methods. 

She lives on the central California coast where she practices a yoga lifestyle grounded in daily rituals of communal love, joy, and peace. She is currently at work on a poetry book called, Cosmic Libido, and a lyrical essay book called, Love Scene, or dancehall on the radio.

Selected Publications

Septet for the Luminous Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 2024)

"3 poems" (The Brooklyn Rail, 2024)

abalone (Albion Books, 2023)

"alchemical sirens" (The Kenyon Review, 2023)

"communicado, two sips" (Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, 2023)

"our general banality" (American Academy of Poets, Poem-A-Day, 2022)

"a run // on black study" (Research in the Teaching of English, 2022)

"grief aesthetics" (liquid blackness, 2022)

"i believe in echoes" (ASAP/J, 2021)

Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021)

"skilled black hands braid geometric insignia as poetry" (Air/Light, 2021)

"2 poems" (Interim Poetics, 2020)

Courses CRES 113: Music and Performance
CRES 183: A Black Lyric
CRES 222: Experimental Language Poetry
CRES 190A: Critical Race Feminism
CRES 68: Approaches to Black Studies