Kamella Cruz is a true multi-hyphenate. She is a poet, researcher, educator, mother, and member of the Tewa community, moving between each of these roles with purpose and the support of her community. Her work brings together poetry and research, Indigenous knowledge and contemporary science, family and academia, always with an interest in how knowledge is carried from one generation to the next. In March 2027, Cruz will also see the publication of her debut book, The Rocky Mountain Literary Field Guide, a collaborative anthology she co-edited featuring more than 300 pieces of poetry and original art documenting living beings across the Rocky Mountains, from Alaska to New Mexico.
Cruz is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and a research assistant at the University of New Mexico, where she works with communities on research related to issues including missing and murdered Indigenous women, environmental factors, and early childhood education. She also draws deeply from the artists, educators, and knowledge keepers in her own family, particularly the work of her grandmother, whose art continues to shape her writing.
In this conversation, Cruz talks about bringing her babies to conferences and classrooms, translating data through poetry, learning to let her writing move across genres, and exploring Indigenous approaches to astronomy and star knowledge.
She also reflects on what it means to make your own categories, to give yourself permission to meander, and to create space for young people to see themselves as capable of becoming many things at once.
Hi Kamella, welcome to Art/In Forum. To start, how would you describe yourself, your work, and your calling?
Kamella: Thank you. I come from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo in northern New Mexico. I am a matriarch in my family, a mother of five, soon to be six. My fourth daughter is due right before Thanksgiving, so it’s a busy life here on the forefront.
First and foremost, I’m a mother, then I’m a poet. I have my MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where I now teach as an assistant professor of creative writing.
I teach journalism, creative nonfiction, fiction, and anything I can to give Indigenous voices the platform and tools they need to tell their own stories and to succeed. I’m very interested in helping Indigenous youth and Indigenous mothers gain that strength and empowerment to tell their stories. I absolutely love teaching. It comes naturally to me. My grandmother was an educator as well.
I come from a long line of artists. I have potters and embroiderers in my family, and very empowered, stubborn, independent women. That carries on through me and through my daughters, who are also artists. My eleven-year-old is a pottery learner right now. She’s learning our language, she’s a painter, she does jewellery. She’s doing everything that I wish I could have been doing when I was little, so it’s wonderful seeing her carry that on.
My father is a silversmith, so there are a lot of traditional artists within my family. We learned the Tewa ways, and communication is my strength – so I am a writer. I rely on language and storytelling as my means, my art realm.
I’m also lucky enough to be a research assistant at the University of New Mexico, so I get to use the other side of my brain. We research data and really important social policy work. We’re out in the communities conducting focus groups with different women and underserved community members, collecting data and research. We work on issues including missing and murdered Indigenous women, environmental factors, early childhood education, and other areas where we can serve the communities that need the work most.
I do a lot of data work, which means looking at heavy numbers and really intense datasets, and then translating that through poetry to make it more accessible to people.
Your career is interdisciplinary in a really incredible way. Between being a journalist, researcher, artist, and mother, do you find that there’s a connection or intersection in your work that surprises people when they encounter you for the first time?
Kamella: My writing is very gentle. It’s very fluid, influenced by land, nature, air, and water. My personality is just a bit stronger than that in person, so I think that takes people by surprise sometimes. My presence is a bit more sturdy, but my writing is very gentle.
It’s also a good tool. What you write and how you’re perceived on paper can be different from your persona when you’re presenting, teaching, and lecturing. It’s a dual kind of tool. That’s a strength. It’s good to have two different voices.
I’ve got one voice when I’m teaching poetry and writing poetry, and I’ve got a different voice when I’m presenting hard data. When I need policies changed and policy influenced, and I’m telling you the hard facts, I do have a different voice for that.
That also leans into my people. Our Tewa language was one of the first poetries. We don’t have really precise language for one thing; we have descriptive language. We’re not just describing a storm. We’re describing the type of storm, the colour of the storm, and the way that it smells.
I love that we’ve got layer upon layer upon layer when we’re speaking. I think that’s influenced me in the way that I present myself and the way that I speak.
I’ve got little ones watching everything that I do, so I’ve got to be confident. I’ve got to show them that they can totally take this world and do whatever they want. That’s really important to me. We’re not meek in this household. We go after what we want.
I’m curious about that translation work, especially how you transition between data, research, and poetry in your day-to-day practice?
Kamella: A lot of it comes down to just being a good mother, being a good Tewa woman, and knowing that our roles are all intersecting with cultural responsibilities. We’re really rooted in cultural practices, lived knowledge, and all of the education that our grandmothers gained, even if they didn’t go to higher education.
Maybe they didn’t make it past high school, but that doesn’t make their lived experiences any less valuable. In some ways, they’re more valuable.
Really tapping into that and understanding that listening to people and all of their lived experiences is equally as important. The PhDs and the Master’s degrees don’t translate in the same way in cultural realms. Having a firm understanding of that, and teaching my kids that, is really important.
My parents did the same. They didn’t necessarily push me towards higher education. They just pushed me to be a good person, a good human being, a good neighbour, and now a good mom. All of that really leans into my work as a writer and as a researcher, but also into my practice.
Being very careful and understanding that respect is reciprocal is important. I can’t go into a community and expect answers and trust without also establishing that first.
Which is an interesting perspective for a journalist, because we’re kind of taught the opposite. It’s also important for research: making sure that we’re rewriting that narrative as Indigenous researchers, going into Indigenous communities and providing for our people, not about our people.
In all of these areas, from your own family members with their practice, as well as yours, artistic intelligence feels like an element in your respective approaches. When you consider artistic intelligence, or the community growing around it, what strikes you as the most significant effect it has had on your work?
Kamella: We were introduced to Art/In Forum through a partnership that we have with the University of Arizona. Our research team is working directly with astronomers and astrophysicists at U of Arizona, specifically Indigenous astrophysicists, of which there aren’t many in the United States. We’re very limited, and we’re fortunate to have this fantastic partnership with Dr. Kate Daniels (U of Arizona, Yellow Mountain Institute).
We’re exploring what astronomy knowledge, star knowledge, and planet knowledge look like from an Indigenous perspective. We’re interested in what that means in terms of oral storytelling, and then translating that into physical science.
How can we take that to our youth and remind them that our ancestors were some of the first astronomers and astrophysicists, and that we’ve known this knowledge for centuries? So we’re really bringing it from the big macro picture to a micro picture and letting our youth learn that. It’s a massive project, but it’s totally something we can do.
I’d love to make another anthology documenting poetry about star knowledge from Indigenous communities and nations across the country. I think that would be a really beautiful way to accompany that work. When we came together and sat with the Forum and talked about these ideas, we weren’t looked at like we were crazy or reaching for something too big. They said, “Yes, of course. That makes so much sense.”
We received encouragement. We received that feeling of, “We’ve got your back. We want to hear more. We want to sit you all down and talk about it.”
We can talk about the social impacts, policy impacts, science impacts, and how we can educate youth around it. It was a really eye-opening moment for us to come together with these really big ideas and realize that we had some support.
Sometimes that’s all it takes. It’s just that bit of encouragement. You need to hear the right thing from the right people at the right time.
Have you felt at any point that there’s a particular throughline or question that your work is trying to answer, or that you find yourself particularly occupied with?
Kamella: I write really deeply into maternal knowledge, what that means as a writer, as a daughter, as a mother, and as someone trying to conceive. I’m interested in what maternal knowledge and generational knowledge mean, whether that’s through song, dance, oral storytelling, pottery, or embroidery.
Oral storytelling is big within our Tewa communities. Pottery tells a story. Embroidery tells a story. All the things that we wear, the colours that we lean towards, the jewellery that we adorn, everything is meant to protect us and take care of us in some way.
I really like to incorporate the artwork that my grandmother did and reflect on that. That’s a muse for me, in conversation with her artwork.
I didn’t get to know her for much of my life, but being in conversation with the pieces of art that she left behind is really important, and it’s a big influence on what I write.
You also spoke earlier about motherhood being at the centre of your professional life. How have you navigated the relationship between your maternal identity and your professional identities?
Kamella: I kind of define my own rules. I take the baby with me to work. The babies are on my hips at all times.
Motherhood and professionalism go hand in hand, which I think is something our society isn’t really accustomed to.
Traditionally, as Tewa women, that’s what we did. We had our babies, put them on our backs, and continued to harvest the fields, harvest corn, and pick melons. It was never something that separated us in our identity. If anything, it brought us closer to our people. So now, in this day and age, I definitely gravitate towards other professional mothers who understand that. But I’m also just making my own rules as I go and taking the baby with me.
Both of my daughters have attended more conferences than most of my coworkers. They go with me everywhere, and they go on stage with me as I give presentations and talks. They give their opinions as I’m speaking and interrupt me as I go, which is part of their learning, too. The youngest are just two and one, and they’re sitting in poetry lectures with me. They go to class with me, and my students absolutely love them.
I think making sure that I’m very clear in my professional spaces that motherhood is just part of who I am is important. It empowers my work and gives me a different lens and perspective. People might be taken by surprise at first, but by the end of the day they’re like, “Do you want me to babysit?”
My family is beyond supportive. My mom comes with me, and I bring my mom and the babies to school with me. Mom and baby hang out and have lunch while I teach class and come back. It’s just a really beautiful relationship.
My husband travels with us as well and comes to our lectures. He has all the girls. He’s a total girl dad, and he’s just completely surrounded by all these intelligent women.
In all of this it feels like you have a natural system going, but I imagine it took time to fall into a rhythm. Do you feel like there is something that you have learned about your own practice that maybe you didn’t know five years ago?
Kamella: I’m a chronic editor. I can’t let things go. I reopen something and I’m like, “Oh, I can make this better.” My husband is always like, “Put it down. Leave it alone.”
Aside from that, I’ve really learned to allow my writing to integrate different genres and different places. I don’t have to be so confined. My poetry doesn’t just have to be poetry, or my creative nonfiction stories have to live within one genre. I’ve really learned to integrate historical writing and research, memory and experience, all intertwined and brought together. That wasn’t something I was as open to before.
I was also concerned about being categorized as an Indigenous writer, an Indigenous female writer, a Native American writer. What category or publisher is going to put me in? Am I automatically going to be put in science fiction if I write about something that seems otherworldly? Am I automatically going to be put into a particular category for my journalism. That was something I was really concerned about. I felt a little controlled by the media and publications, and what that looked like.
But I’ve come to realize now, especially through teaching, that I want my students to know that, yes, there are barriers and there are boundaries, but if we’re well informed and well educated, then we can break them.
If we know why we’re pushing back against them or why we want to break these boundaries, then we can make a good argument for it. And we can make our own categories.
Indigenous futurism is huge right now. This idea of having sovereignty over your landscape and your narrative is really big. So while I’m teaching it to my students, I’m also reminding myself that I can break all the barriers I want with my writing. I don’t have to fit into a particular category.
What do you feel is the most generous thing that someone has said about your work recently, and how did it make you feel?
Kamella: I don’t know if I can pick one thing. To be spoiled for choice is a great blessing.
What really influences me the most, and makes me happy, is when I come home at the start of a new semester and have new students from all over the country. You’re doing your introductions, letting them know who you are, and giving them a safe space to be within your classroom.
I’ve had so many young Indigenous women say, “You reminded me that I can do this. This is why I’m here.”
That just means so much. If you’re a first-generation college student, if it’s your first time leaving the reservation, if it’s your first time being away from home, you’re missing out on traditional foods and traditional ceremony. You’re choosing to be away from what nourishes you, which is the land. And you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for or what you’re going to find.
If I can give individuals that safe space to feel like they’re being seen and heard, and that there’s a much larger purpose and reason for them sitting in a classroom, I think that means a whole lot to me.
It’s also about reminding them that you can be multiple things all at once. You can be intelligent and a mom, and be a sports fan, and be a supportive partner, and have interests in fashion, technology, cinema, or anything that you want. All of it is okay.
When I’m teaching new students and showing them the class expectations and what to anticipate for the semester, and they can say, “Okay, yeah, you inspired me. I’m pumped to be in this class,” I’m like, “Okay, yeah. I did this.”
It’s a good, proud auntie moment and proud mom moment, where I’m like, “Okay, I’m here to support you.”
And I think that brings us back to my beginning. At the end of the day, I’m a mom and I’m a maternal figure. Our job as Tewa women is to look out for others and make sure that they feel nourished and well cared for. At the end of the day, that’s essentially my greatest calling.
That’s beautiful! To close us off, is there a lesson that you have learned or are learning that you’d like to share?
Kamella: I’m really blessed to have all of these opportunities, but I also acknowledge that a lot of it is the right place, right time. Most of it, though, is really hard work in making all of the disciplines for yourself. Sometimes we veer off our paths. It took me a really long time to get my undergraduate degree because I had the babies. I’d go to school and take a break, then come back. Allowing myself that space to meander and wander, and then find what was truly important to come back to, was really important. It might have taken me eleven years to get my undergraduate degree, but I did it.
I think that’s also important to remind students that society puts us on this really tight time limit. It’s like, “You’ve got to get your degree in this amount of years.” And I’m like, we’re still young. We’re still learning. We don’t know what we want. It’s okay if you meander. It might be a little expensive, but it’s okay. You’ll come back at some point if it’s something that’s meant for you.
We’re gaining a lot of experience as we go. Age is power. We’re gaining wisdom and experience as we go, and the future looks bright.
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