bio
Tara Westmor is a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation/Teaching Fellowship (2026-2027) at Kenyon Collegeand Fulbright Student Researcher (2024-2025) who holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, from New Mexico State University, with a focus on poetry. She holds a Masters in Southeast Asian Studies and is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. She has worked as staff and as a managing editor on several literary journals and presses that produce, publish, and distribute poetry. She has work published and forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain Review, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. Her first poetry collection, Field Notes from the Daylight Factory, is a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award with Black Lawrence Press.
Alongside her commitment to poetry communities, Tara Westmor works to build interdisciplinary connections across the arts, media, and academia, promoting transnational research, pedagogy, and creative practice. She has organized conferences in Southeast Asian Studies and helped develop professionalization workshops for scholars in the field. These initiatives foster transnational collaboration and work toward decolonizing academic research by strengthening connections between scholars based in Western institutions and those working in Southeast Asia. At UC Riverside, Tara served as project assistant for the NEH- and Association for Asian Studies-funded New Models of Mentorship in Asian Studies/Global Asias Program. The initiative developed free workshops and programming for students across University of California campuses, working to transform academic mentorship structures that have historically marginalized women, scholars of color, and other underrepresented groups.
Tara’s anthropological research examines how artistic practices become forms of social life. Working across the arts, media, and cultural expression, she investigates how people use, transform, and circulate expressive forms to produce shared meanings, negotiate cultural authority, and imagine collective futures. Her current book project, Recitation Nation and the Social Life of Poetry in Vietnam, draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork in Hồ Chí Minh City to trace how poetry is learned, recited, and circulated across schools, media, and community spaces. She theorizes recitation as a form of cultural commoning: a collective practice through which aesthetic and ethical knowledge becomes a shared resource for everyday life. Her related research on Vietnamese adaptations of South Korean television explores how media forms travel across national and linguistic borders, acquiring new meanings through local creative practices and cultural expectations.
Her research engages questions of nationalism, creativity, pedagogy, and cultural politics, with particular attention to how artistic practices mediate relationships between institutions and grassroots communities. She has presented her work at conferences in anthropology, Southeast Asian studies, and semiotics. As an educator, Tara centers decolonial approaches, collaborative learning, and pedagogical justice, working to create more equitable spaces for research, teaching, and creative practice.