bio
Tara Westmor is a Fulbright Student Researcher who holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, from New Mexico State University, with a focus on poetry. She holds a Masters in Southeast Asian Studies and is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. She has worked as staff and as a managing editor on several literary journals and presses that produce, publish, and distribute poetry. She has work published and forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain Review, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. Her first poetry collection, Field Notes from the Daylight Factory, is a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award with Black Lawrence Press.
While it is important to maintain a commitment to poetry communities, Tara Westmor is committed to inter-disciplinary community-building and promoting transnational research, pedagogy, and craft. She has organized annual conferences in Southeast Asian Studies and has helped to organize workshops on professionalism for Southeast Asian Studies scholars. These foster international collaboration between Western scholarship and Southeast Asian scholarship which is necessary in decolonizing academic research. Tara is the project assistant for an NEH and AAS (Association of Asian Studies) grant called ‘New Models of Mentorship in Asian Studies/Global Asias Program’ at UCR. This grant aims to host free workshops and programs to students in Southeast Asian Studies departments in the entire University of California system to decolonize white, male systems of mentorship that do not serve women and/or POC.
Tara’s anthropology research focuses on literature, namely poetry, in southern Vietnam in the wake of neoliberalizing schemas that coopt the arts. She has presented her research at numerous conferences in Anthropology, Southeast Asian Studies, and semiotics. As an educator in one of the most diverse campuses in the United States, her pedagogy and research center decoloniality and promote equity and pedagogical justice (especially in the wake of COVID-19).