Amaris Feland Ketcham

Amaris Feland Ketcham is an Associate Professor in the University of New Mexico’s Honors College. As a writer and artist, Amaris explores the combination of text, image, and place. She has written two poetry books, A Poetic Inventory of the Sandia Mountains and Glitches in the FBI; a camping guide to New Mexico, Best Tent Camping: New Mexico; and a graphic novel, Unfiltered: A Cancer Year Diary. Her work with Poetic Routes, in interactive poetic cartography of Albuquerque, has been adopted by the Albuquerque City Planning Department, as a way to use poetry as a means of understanding neighborhoods and community character throughout town.

Amaris is the Faculty Advisor for the nationally acclaimed arts and literature magazine Scribendi, which has won the Associated Collegiate Press’s Pacemaker Award twice under her mentorship. In addition to teaching the ins and outs of literary publishing, she teaches nonfiction and poetry comics, narrative journalism, handmade books and zines, and creative placemaking. She has painted murals throughout Albuquerque, acted in a radio drama about the Badlands National Park, and taken students on multi-week camping trips along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Amaris is currently the Chair of the Student Publications Board and is an Artist-in-Medicine with the University of New Mexico Cancer Center.

Here’s what Amaris had to say about her time in the program:

“At EWU, I was allowed to explore both my creativity and professional possibilities. Even though I was not a TA, the work I do now as a professor is directly linked to my work on Willow Springs, with Writers in the Community, and my coursework in the MFA program.”

Check out more of her work on her website: www.amarisketcham.com