alice f.z. (née Fulmer, she/her, b. 1996) is a poetess-bardess and PhD candidate at UC Santa Barbara in English, where she studies medieval poetry, gender, and sexuality. alice had taken interest in poetry since she was a young girl. This was cemented at age ten when, in her childhood backyard reading a triple A (yes, that 'AAA') magazine, an article on William Wordsworth and England's Lake Distirct caught her special interest. Since then, she has scribbled poetry in the back of classrooms until she was in the front teaching them -- now she just writes the poems openly. Growing up in southern California, she led a double life where she played the roles of "wayward youth" and also "most likely to succeed". After playing in bands for a few years and a brief trial run of Buddhist monastic life, she graduated from Santa Ana College in 2018 with her Associates Degree for Transfer in English. She studied under the late Kathy Patterson, who taught her Shakespeare, British, and World literatures.
She would transfer to UCLA, where she finished her English BA (Creative Writing emphasis) and studied under poets Karen Kervorkian, Fred D'Aguiar, and Harryette Mullen in workshop classes. She also took several courses in medieval literature, which would stick with her as a parallel influence to contemporary poetics. It was at UCLA that in 2020 a manuscript of hers received the honorable mention for UCLA’s Fred and Edith Herman Memorial Prize, their local Academy of American Poets’s University and College Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection Faunalia (2023) came out on Sul Books. Journal publications include new words {press}, Ultraviolet Books, and Tyger Quarterly, DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE, and various undergraduate journals. Currently, she has poems forthcoming in Fence, the engine(idling, and Lilac Peril. Her narrative poem “the book of dame ærney” is being published as a microchapbook by fifth wheel press as part of their upcoming 2026 Pride series. In her current role, she studies Ricardian and early Lancastrian poets (c. 1377-1422) and teaches composition at UC Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Her dissertation on Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and related poems is anticipated before Fall 2028.
You can find her on Instagram, Bluesky and ghost.io @faith2fleurs.
