About
Petra Salazar, with Learning Park WS, is a coyote educator from Rio Arriba, currently residing in Winston-Salem, a Climate Haven — a place projected to remain relatively stable and habitable, with fewer extreme heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and with more reliable water and agricultural resilience.
Salazar devotes her sacred attention and labor to poetry, family, and a creative reuse nonprofit working to make art sustainable and accessible. Though she now lives with her family in North Carolina, her heart — and her work — remain rooted in the high desert of Aztlán.
A former military diesel mechanic turned community arts organizer, Salazar holds an MFA in Poetry from UNC-Greensboro and an M.Ed. from George Washington University. Salazar’s perspective is shaped by lived experience — as a labor activist, educator, Army National Guard diesel mechanic, military conscientious objector, certified master gardener, herbalism apprentice, and Tai chi and mindfulness practitioner.
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Salazar’s writing maps coyote identity, ancestral memory, and sacred geographies of the U.S. Southwest. She writes to metabolize loss, bridge past and future, and cultivate new possibilities for identity and belonging in a modern world shaped by rigid binaries and policed borders. Her debut book, Harsh Terrain, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. A finalist and honorable mention in the 2022 Button Chapbook Contest, her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Sonora Review, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere.
