My poem ‘Taste’ explores how sensation and experience help us create ourselves and how both pleasure and pain are awakened in the realm of the senses. I work in many disciplines —writing, social practice, watercolor, teaching. Research is a big part of my practice. I'm dedicated to environmental, racial, gender, disability, and sexual justice, and those ethics drive my work. My poetry is different from my short stories and novels, as it generally addresses the body and my personal life. 

 

My longer narrative pieces are grounded in legal and field research within vulnerable communities. My watercolor practice is invested in pleasure and personal liberation—​I look to the work of many different artists as guides: Odile Rendon, Barbara Friedman, Rothko, the list goes on. 

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YXTA MAYA MURRAY  is a novelist, art critic, playwright, social practice artist, and law professor. The author of nine books, her most recent are the story collection, The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could (University of Nevada Press, 2020), and the novel, Art Is Everything (TriQuarterly Press, 2021). Her next work of nonfiction, Artivism and the Law, is in progress and will be published by Cornell University Press. She has won a Whiting Award, an Art Writer’s Grant, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation/Money For Women, and was a 2021 New York City Arts Corps Grants co-grantee. She’s also been named a fellow at the Huntington Library for her work on radionuclide contamination in Simi Valley, California.