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). She was a 2024 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, a 2024 Disquiet Literary Prize Poetry Finalist, and a 2023 Molokai Arts Center Artist in Residence. She has received support from 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, and Pleiades, among other publications. Noelani has contributed to The Rumpus and SOMA Magazine, and is the former Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Ignatian Literary Magazine. She has hosted community write-ins and facilitated generative, multi-genre workshops focusing on family archives. 

Noelani’s writing is an excavation of identity, particularly in the context of 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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