Kamala Platt

Kamala Platt, Ph.D., M.F.A. is adjunct profesora, artist, independent scholar and author in South Texas and at The Meadowlark Center, Kansas. Publications include: Weedslovers, Finishing Line 2014; On the Line, Wings Press, 2010 & Kinientos, (compiler) Wordsworth, 1992. She has shared her visual and performance art and poetry broadly, most often in community arts and cultural centers.
Through “green rascuache” lifeways, Kamala searches borderlands for footholds of dignity & well-being (resistance to walls, injustices, militarisms, ‘isms, ecological disrespect…)– amidst a feverish planet’s crises. Her current scholarship shares women’s environmental justice poetics creating a lens through which to understand visions of a “sustainable” future.

Her Westside Barrio, San Antonio home is native habitat and garden, library and studio– offering seasonal produce, books & art to share: limones, loquats, nopalitos, tunas, figs, peaches and pecans…. Family roots in ecology and human rights and a cross-cultural childhood among Mennonites in Kansas, & in Orissa (Odisha), India, provide foundation. In recent years, Esperanza Center for Peace & Justice, Texas Master Naturalists, Cultural Capital, Climate Reality Leadership and Texas Women Farmers’ Holistic Management… build her knowledge.

Kamala held fellowships with Center for the Study of Women and Society, OU (Women, Science & the Sacred), Feminist Research Institute (UNM) and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center (Gateways) in San Antonio. She holds an MFA in poetry (BGSU, Ohio), an MA in Interdisciplinary Arts (Columbia College, Chicago), a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (UT, Austin) and undergraduate degree (Art, International Development, Religion), Bethel College, Kansas.