Tara Shea Burke is a queer writer from Paris, Virginia and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Her poetry and hybrid writing are recently published in HAD, Moist Poetry Journal, Screen Door Review, Shenandoah Literary, Pithead Chapel, Khôra, and Southern Humanities Review. Her small books of poetry, Animal Like Any Other and Let the Body Beg, were published in 2019 and 2014, and she has poems and essays anthologized in collections that focus on queer nature, the body, mountains, rivers, and ecologies. She was also an editor and board member for Sinister Wisdom, the oldest running lesbian literary journal in the country. She edited The Lesbian Body.

Tara’s been teaching undergraduate first-year writing classes, creative research practices, and poetry workshops at universities and communities colleges since 2012 and has taught community creative writing classes at The Visual Arts Center of Richmond, where she was a Studio Access Resident in 2023/2024. There, she began a multi-textual craft practice exploring visual poetics, ceramics, film photography, collage, and the practice that feeds her most: quilting and sewing. Her current projects and research focus on the primary tensions in memory studies: the places between the personal and the historical, the body and the archive, between argument and lyric, headstone and lament. Grief and lost/speculative family narratives haunt her writing, as well as the house she grew up in on the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains between Fauquier, Clarke, and Loudon counties, a place filled with stark dichotomies of class, race, and early American history.

She spent most of her coming of age years in restaurants, yoga studios, gay bars, and sitting by the water, trying to fit her queer body into a structured society she couldn’t yet rebel against. In addition to current poetics, she’s working on a speculative novel about the strange time between the present and possible climate futures. The more she lifts heavy weights in the gym as an adult, the more she wants to be a personal trainer for regular degular people who want to feel strong and live. She bought a big fat textbook to show her how. There’s more, there’s always more.

Contact: tarasheaburke at gmail dot com