Kelsey Castañeda

Kelsey Castaneda (they/she) is a queer writer and author of RAM (Damaged Goods Press, 2018). They hold an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, a B.A. from Georgetown College, and a TEFL certificate. Their creative work and research interests focus on hybrid forms, creative erasure, body horror, and ecological decay. They currently live in Germany with their partner and three cats. 

Poet Roy G. Guzmán and author of Catrachos (Graywolf Press, 2020) on RAM:

“With the Aeneid, Virgil intended to alchemize a distinctly Latin myth by magnifying a minor character from Homer’s Greek poem, the Iliad. In a way, translation begins from a need to (re)create one’s own identity or origin story.

Ari K. Castañeda understands too well that translation isn’t simply what we etymologically understand as a reposition of materials through time and space; instead, what RAM reveals is that series of transformations that occur, at least linguistically, when people are silenced, displaced, disembodied, and subcategorized. The character of Ram is distilment but also recuperation. RAM is about the history of violence in our canon, about men furnishing patriarchal myths at the cost of misjudging the lives that stand in their way. But like the saga of a word like queer, Ram fights back. “but ram doesn’t wanna,” we’re told. “ram eats things to see what’s inside them … ram pushes herself up from horse corpse w bloodied hooves.” This is decadent poetry. This is powerfully articulated feminist poetry. When Ram says, “finally, all my pain walks w joy,” I think of Plath, Sarah Kane, Audre Lorde. I believe Ram. I believe Ram.”