A Conversation with heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

Experience the Episode

Presented by Institute for Latino Studies

Savor the scent of bright yellow mustard fields blooming across the hillsides. Partake in the mystery as an antique key opens a grandmother’s “chest of little things.” Witness the transmutation of chronic pain into lyrical, life-saving power. Embrace this vibrant oral history interview with poet heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, conducted by Notre Dame Ph.D. student Karla Yaritza Maravilla Zaragoza, that serves as the foundation for a rigorous exploration of how language’s restorative pulse can document, resist, and ultimately heal.

Will you be on campus in October 2026? Join poets Emma Trelles and Alexandra Lytton Regalado for Now You See It: Ekphrastic Poetry Workshop at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art on Saturday, October 3, 2026 from 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. In this creative writing workshop, you’ll practice looking and writing more deeply through the lens of color in abstract and figurative works. For more information and to register for the workshop, please visit the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art website.

For more information on Letras Latinas at the Institute for Latino Studies, please visit the Letras Latinas website.

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Meet the Poet: heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker, and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting, Ephemeral, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, and Wayward Creatures. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; poetry coeditor at Apogee Journal; and editor/curator of the Anomalous Press column Wild-Wired: Neuroqueer and Neurodivergent Poetics. A Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation alum and recipient of the 2023 Creative Capital Award, they have received poetry fellowships from Zoeglossia, CantoMundo, Radar Productions, and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Their poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in The American Poetry Review, The Normal School, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alocasia, Poetry, and Waxwing, among other places. They live in unceded Acjachemen and Tongva lands, otherwise known as Southern California.

Meet the Moderator: Karla Yaritza Maravilla Zaragoza

Karla Yaritza Maravilla Zaragoza (she/her/ella) just completed her second year as a Ph.D. student in English and is a Joseph Gaia Distinguished Fellow in Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. As a scholar, her passion lies in advocating for greater representation of Chican@/Latinx experiences in literature and education. As such, she is interested in conducting research through Chicana Third Space and Postcolonial critical theories to explore storytelling as a cultural resource against trauma and discrimination, assess the role of spirituality within Chican@/Latinx culture, and implement a multidirectional feminist praxis within a broad analysis of 20th/21st-century literature. Her ultimate goal is to advocate for using Curanderismo (traditional Latinx folk healing) in the U.S. public health care system to increase accessibility for lower-income families.

In addition to conducting research and writing essays, she is a Washington-based poet whose work explores illness, myth, and sacrifice detailing the experiences of migrant farmworkers in the Yakima Valley, the borderlands, and across the United States. She was the first poet featured in Poetry Northwest’s “Presenting” series for up-and-coming poets, praised for her language and aesthetic, described as “an agricultural beat, a field worker’s beat, a hot beat—[that] becomes prayer.” Her poetry has also appeared in The Acentos Review, Palette Poetry, and Huizache. Her manuscript “La Casa Negra” was a 2022 semifinalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize through Letras Latinas at Notre Dame. Her favorite poets are Natalie Diaz, Xavier Cavazos, and Natalie Scenters Zapico.