Photo Credit: Hebert Lucio

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Noelani Piters is a writer living in San Francisco, on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples. She was a 2024 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, a 2024 Disquiet Literary Prize Poetry Finalist, and a 2023 Molokai Arts Center Artist in Residence. She has received support from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and Kearny Street Workshop. Her work can be found in Poetry, The Offing, Epiphany Magazine, swamp pink, and Pleiades, among other publications. She has contributed to The Rumpus and SOMA Magazine, and is also the former Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Ignatian Literary Magazine.


Noelani’s writing is an excavation of identity, particularly in the context of diaspora and cultural multiplicity. Through poetry and prose, she explores the interconnectivity of place, heritage, food, belonging, mixedness, familial structures, oral storytelling, and other-ing, and how these concepts influence, fragment, and complicate one’s sense of self. She is fascinated by personal anecdotes that feel like myths, how aesthetics shape our emotions (and vice versa), and the invisible threads that tie us all together.

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