heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is an American poet, scholar, and educator. Rhodes' work is influenced by their identities as a queer, sick/disabled and non-binary person of Colombian descent.^[1][2] As of 2023, they were a visiting assistant professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Pomona College.^[3]

Rhodes has been published in the American Poetry Review, The Normal School, the Poetry Foundation,^[4] Waxwing,^[5] speculative nonfiction,^[6] As/Us, Pank, Raspa, Word Riot, Feminist Studies, Huizache, Nat.Brut,^[7] The Ascentos Review, Nepantla, and the Yellow Medicine Review,^[8] and displayed/performed at the National Queer Arts Festival, The Sick Collective, the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, SomArts, and Galería de la Raza,^[9] along with other places. They have received poetry fellowships from Zoeglossia, CantoMundo, Radar Productions, VONA,^[5][10] and Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.^[10]

In an interview with Rosebud Ben-Oni, they explained that their book The Inheritance of Haunting deals with themes of hauntology through legacies of violence and colonialism, generational trauma, as well as community, resistance, and collective memory.^[11][12] The way hauntology is portrayed in their work was reportedly inspired by authors such as Homi K. Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Avery Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, and Gayatri Spivak.^[12]

• The Inheritance of Haunting, University of Notre Dame Press^[10][13]
• Ephemeral , EcoTheo Collective (2023)^[14]

They were a quarter-finals judge for the 2017 Youth Speaks/Brave New Voices National Poetry Slam Competition.^[15]

• 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, selected by Ada Limón, for The Inheritance of Haunting^[15][13][16]
• 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award finalist^[13]
• 2022 Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize, for Ephemeral^[10]
• 2023 Creative Capital Award^[14]

Rhodes was born in Arizona and raised in California.^[15][13] They have also lived in Brooklyn, New York,^[7][9] and Cambridge, Massachusetts.^[13] They are a second generation Colombian immigrant,^[9] and a bruja.^[17] As of January 2025, they live in the San Gabriel Mountains foothills^[18] of Southern California.^[19] They have a PhD in political theory from the CUNY Graduate Center.^[10]

They style their name intentionally with all lowercase letters,^[20] and use they/them pronouns.^[21] They are neurodivergent, identifying as neuroqueer.^[5]

They had done extensive research into militarized geography, such as in Colombia, Kashmir, El Salvador, and the US-Mexico border.^[12]