Noʻu Revilla is aqueerHawaiianfemme poet, educator, and scholar. She is the author of several scholarly articles, twochapbooks, and a poetry collection that was the winner of the 2021National Poetry Series. Her work prioritizes collaboration,aloha, and gratitude. She has performed and facilitated poetry workshops throughoutHawaiʻi as well as Canada,Papua New Guinea, and the United Nations.[1] Currently, Revila is an assistant professor of Creative Writing in the English Department at theUniversity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Revilla was born and raised inWaiʻehu on theisland of Maui.[2] Growing up, she was surrounded bywāhine,fishermen,hula dancers, singers, andstorytellers.[3]
Revilla's work has been heavily influenced byHaunani-Kay Trask.[4] Nevilla first discovered Trask's work at theBobst Library atNYU, while studying journalism in 2005.[5] Trask's poetry and use of language informed Revilla's work on love andAloha ʻĀina.[4] Trask's work, particularly her poemSons, which approaches the notion of being "slyly / reproductive"[clarification needed],[6] is a theme in Revila's approach to queer ʻŌiwifeministethos.[6]
Revilla received a B.A. in Women's Studies, a M.A. in English with a concentration in Cultural Studies, and a PhD in Creative Writing atUniversity of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
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Revilla is the author ofSay Throne, a chapbook published by TinFish Press in 2011. This chapbook consists of poems that are described as "meld[ing] sex and sovereignty" by editorSusan Schultz.[7]
Trask's notion of "slyly / reproductive" is also referenced directly in Revilla's chapbookSay Throne in the poemPull Without Push, which was re-titled asRope / Tongue when it was reprinted as Poem of the Week byKore Press in 2016.]
Her next chapbook titledPermission to Make Digging Sounds was published inEffigies III bySalt Publishing in 2019. The Effigies series is an anthology that featured four debut books that weave the work of "Pacific islander women poets fromGuam, Hawai’i, andFiji. Despite their distant origins, all these writers explore culture, history, politics,genealogy, feminism, and the environment."[8]
In 2021, Revilla's full-length poetry collection titledAsk the Brindled was selected byRick Barot as the winner of theNational Poetry Series and was published withMilkweed Editions in 2022. This collection is dedicated to Haunani-Kay Trask and all her "sly siblings.”
This collection is described in a review featured in Poetry Foundation: “ThroughoutAsk the Brindled, this conflation of the intimate and the political, an embodied queer, decolonial critique is powerfully manifest in the poems’ visceral imagery, their fluidity between English and the Hawaiian language, and in Revilla’s formal strategies.”[9]
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Revilla, in collaboration withJamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, was featured inDetours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi, a book published byDuke University in 2019. Their article titledAloha is Deoccupied Love offers a view of aloha that Revilla and Osorio say demonstrates "a complex set of practices and relationships that keep the integrity of our ʻāina, ʻohana, and lāhui at the center."[10]
In 2020, Revilla co-edited a special issue ofBiography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. In collaboration with Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, they co-wrote the introduction,Mana from the Mauna. This journal issue, published by the University of Hawaiʻi Press, was curated by Revilla and Kuwada to highlight the 2019 stand atPuʻuhuluhulu on Hawaiʻi island, the most recent in a long history of ʻŌiwi resistance to development onMaunakea.[11] The contributors of this issue testify to the movement to protect Maunakea, enforcing what the collective believe is worth protecting, and who should be protectors.
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From 2012 to 2013, Revilla wrote the visual poem,Altering Papers, in response to the 21 letters written byQueen Lilioukalani and performed this poem atThe Honolulu Museum of Art.[12]
Revilla was a part of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference in Toronto in 2015, where she presented onEa/Breath/Rising: Poetry for Love, Reconnection, and Sovereignty.[13]
In the summer of 2019, Revilla taught poetry at Puʻuhuluhulu University while standing to protect Maunakea with her lāhui.[14] In November of the same year, Revilla attended the 40thNational Women's Studies Association conference in San Francisco, where she presentedLove Letter to Haunani-Kay Trask in the roundtable session titledOceanic Indigenous Feminisms: S/Pacific Bodies, Poetics and Politics, which focused on poets, scholars, and activists who practice inter- and transnational feminist politics.[15]
After Haunani-Kay Trask died in 2021, the English Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa organized a colloquium entitledHaunani-Kay Trask and the Study of Literature in Hawaiʻi, which featuredBrandy Nālani McDougall, Laura Lyons,kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui, and Revilla as speakers.[16]
Revilla in collaboration with Hawai’i State Poet Laureate Brandy Nālani McDougall and Dana Naone Hall, ʻŌiwi poets of Maui, composed a five-page poem entitledAia i hea ka wai o Lahaina ("Where is the Water of Lahaina"), which is dedicated toLahaina and the communities of Maui Komohana (West Maui). Composed as a water song,Aia i hea ka wai o Lahaina connects theAugust 2023 wildfires on Maui with the history of colonial deforestation and water diversion in Hawaiʻi.Aia i hea ka wai o Lahaina borrows its titular refrain from the beloved ancestral mele (song)He mele no Kāne ("Where is the water of Kāne"), which emphasizes all of the ways that water is sacred and comes to us to give us life.[17] This work was first presented in September 2023 as the opening for Indigenous human rights lawyer Julian Aguon’s Honolulu lectureGathering Flowers by the Road: An Indigenous Pursuit of Climate Justice.[18]
Poetry
In Anthologies
Interviews
Translation
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