NOELANI PITERS

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Noelani Piters is a writer of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi, Chinese, and haole descent living in San Francisco (Ramaytush Ohlone land). A recipient of fellowships from Indigenous Nations Poets, VONA, and PEN America, she was a finalist for the 2025 James Welch Prize and the 2024 Disquiet Literary Prize in poetry. Noelani was a 2023 Molokai Arts Center Artist in Residence and has received scholarships and support from Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and Kearny Street Workshop. Her work can be found in or is forthcoming from Poetry Northwest, The Hopkins Review, Poetry, The Offing, Epiphany Magazine, swamp pink, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Noelani has contributed to The Rumpus and SOMA Magazine, and is the former Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Ignatian Literary Magazine. She hosts community write-ins and readings, and facilitates multi-genre generative writing workshops centering family archives, food, and visual arts.

Noelani’s writing is an excavation of identity, particularly in the context of ‘Ōiwi diaspora and cultural multiplicity. Through poetry and prose, she explores the interconnectivity of place, heritage, food, belonging, mixedness, familial structures, oral storytelling, and other-ing, and how these concepts influence, fragment, and complicate one’s sense of self. She is fascinated by personal anecdotes that feel like myths, how aesthetics shape our emotions (and vice versa), and the invisible threads that tie us all together.

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