Taneesh Kaur is a teaching artist of East Indian descent based in San Francisco, a social justice advocate who uses nature to understand and dismantle systems of mental and physical oppression. Her visual art has been shown in galleries in the Bay Area and Southern California and has received praise from the international Luxembourg Art Prize 2022. Their poetry appears in the SF Public Library’s Poem of the Day, The Bloom, Great Weather for Media among others, and was long-listed for the 2021 Frontier Poetry OPEN prize. Their poetry chapbook “Thawing” is forthcoming in 2023. More of her work can be found in English and Spanish at www.TaneeshCantos.com.
Living on the edge of Ohio with Kentucky in public school with blonde beauties as a dark haired, green-eyed Indian girl who was bifurcated from her body who didn’t realize the extent of my dad’s control beyond knowing how not to be based on how he was, constantly overlooked or if not teased for my mustache and “hairy” arms I would only wear long or three-quarter-length sleeves in high school which were en vogue at the time to avoid being called that word in high school by the boys, which was a word they would say in middle school when I’d feel like I was their friend and then they’d say it and it would shut me up and I’d cry into the window of the bus or into my thick black hair and books and they were always quick to make sure I didn’t feel like I belonged, because at any moment they could shut me down with that word werewolf
