Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of the art collective Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. Her poetry, essays, and Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction have been published internationally, and includes two books of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones—and many chapbooks of poetry, short fiction, and visual art, including Sonoma, Capacity, and appalachiapacific, which won the Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction.
Taitano has received fellowship support from Submittable and The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. She has served as poetry faculty for the Kundiman Writers’ Retreat and as a Curatorial Council member for Yerba Buena Center for the Art's Triennial exhibition of contemporary art. She is the current Program and Community Manager at Kearny Street Workshop, where she coordinates APAture, an annual festival of Pacific Islander and Asian American art. Taitano's work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.
A dynamic collective comprised of artists Lisa Jarrett (Portland, OR) Lehua M. Taitano (San Francisco, CA), and Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng (Honolulu, HI). Art 25 is the culmination of years (and ancestral lifetimes) of shared curiosity, vision, and an outright insistence to see their culture thrive within contemporary art. The collective investigates how Indigenous and Black art lives in the 21st century and collaborates with contemporary artists worldwide who envision how it will flourish in the 25th century and beyond. In forming a future archive, the collective interrogates historical access, curation, collection, consumption, and preservation of Indigenous and Black art and culture.
Books
From a diasporic Chamoru perspective, there’s an irreconcilable difference between island and mainland, and between the expanses of California and the accidents of the psychic archipelago, but Taitano’s poetics works by queering that distance, by finding the homology in difference, by embracing the synaesthetic intimacies of landscape...As with other Chamoru and Pacific poetics, Taitano’s work evinces a strong eco-poetic dimension, especially with regard to the intersections between environmental and colonial violence... — Urayoàn Noel
Lehua Taitano’s unforgettable poetry joins a new wave of Chamorro and Pacific literature. In A Bell Made of Stones, she bravely navigates the currents of mixed-race indigenous identity, transoceanic migration, and queer sexuality through a series of experimental (and lyrical) typographic poems. With the typewriter as her canoe, Taitano chants homeward “for the flightless, to stretch roots, for the husk of things set adrift.”
—Craig Santos Perez
Sonoma is a book of dignity and definition. As the result of craft. As a result of the poet as present, to siphon, funnel, perceive, relay. Taitano as the investigator, but there needs to be another word: a form of investigation that exhibits respect, is careful, is intensely aware and is resolved to an acceptance of the emerging beauty...
—Greg Bem
appalachiapacific is a chapbook of short fiction and winner of the Merriam-Frontier Award at the University of Montana.