No'u Revilla
2025 Retreat Mentor, Indigenous Nations Poets
Noʻu Revilla (ʻŌiwi) is a poet and educator. Born and raised with the Līlīlehua rain of Maui, she prioritizes aloha, gratitude, and collaboration in her practice. Noʻu is the author of Ask the Brindled (Milkweed Editions 2022), winner of the National Poetry Series and Balcones Prize. Her writing also appears in Lit Hub, ANMLY, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, World Literature Today, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, Split This Rock, the Library of Congress, and elsewhere. She was a 2023 Poetry and the Senses Fellow at Berkeley Arts Research Center and an 8x8 Artist at Shangri La: Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design in 2024. Alongside Franny Choi, Bao Phi, and Terisa Siagatonu, she co-edited We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word (Haymarket Books 2024). She also served as Poem-a-Day guest editor in May 2024. Noʻu believes that poetry and politics run in the same river. So, after teaching poetry at Puʻuhuluhulu University in 2019, where she stood with her lāhui to protect Maunakea, she co-edited a special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Journal with Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada entitled “We are Maunakea: Aloha ʻĀina Narratives of Protest, Protection, and Place.” After the Maui wildfires in 2023, she composed an elegy for Lahaina with Brandy Nālani McDougall and Dana Naone Hall. Noʻu is a lifetime “slyly / reproductive” student of Haunani-Kay Trask and serves as an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa.
Publications
Ask the Brindled
Genre: Poetry
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: August 2022
Ask the Brindled, selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, bares everything that breaks between “seed” and “summit” of a life—the body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians—and it does not let readers look away.
In this debut collection, No‘u Revilla crafts a lyric landscape brimming with shed skin, water, mo‘o, ma‘i. She grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page red—for desire, for love, for generations of blood spilled by colonizers. She hides knives in her hair “the way my grandmother—not god— / the way my grandmother intended,” and we heed; before her, “we stunned insects dangle.”
Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi with contemporary experiences of queer love and queer grief, Revilla writes toward sovereignty: linguistic, erotic, civic. Through the medium of formal dynamism and the material of ʻŌiwi culture and mythos, this living decolonial text both condemns and creates.
Ask the Brindled is a song from the shattered throat that refuses to be silenced. It is a testament to queer Indigenous women who carry baskets of names and stories, “still sacred.” It is a vow to those yet to come: “the ea of enough is our daughters / our daughters need to believe they are enough.”
