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