E. Rowan Mena

Sound Art & Accessibility

June 28, 2025 by E. Rowan

I’m a disabled, autistic artist and I find that most public environments are potentially inaccessible to me for myriad reasons, chiefly: the unpredictability of access when I’m using my wheelchair and the unpredictability of needing to talk to strangers to get my access needs met. More and more as discussions around accessiblity enter the art spaces, I’ve been noticing that some institutions are doing incredibly effective work towards inclusion and accessibility around physical space access needs such as ramps, automatic […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: accessibility, art, autism, autistic, neurodiversity, sound art

Disability in My Work

February 16, 2024 by E. Rowan

I’ve been invited to talk about how disability has featured in my research or teaching. This is in preparation for that. This will focus mostly on how disability has featured in my research, which is primarily creative and poetry-based. But first: what happened. I got the flu in 2016 and just weeks later became bedridden, unable to read, write, speak, walk, think, or process information. I was teaching at Brown at the time. After months of medical tests, all of […]

Categories: Art, Poetry • Tags: disability, poetry

Protected: Bedtime/Morning Routine

December 7, 2022 by E. Rowan

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Categories: CFS Health Journal

Perkele

March 8, 2021 by E. Rowan

Perkele. It’s my favorite Finnish word, and I’m not alone. It’s perhaps the best known Finnish word, the most Finnish Finnish word.

Categories: Art • Tags: handmade, letterpress, notebook, rewards

Leave a comment

Tying Knots: A language of anxiety

April 1, 2019 by E. Rowan

CW: Ableism, mental illness, lots of personal stuff How might you read this work. If I tell you that each French knot is a wound, or is wound 3 times with 2 strands of floss around a needle poked first front to back through the postcard, then sewn through the pre-punched hole back to front, and returned through the hole. That each hole is placed individually in relation to the work as a whole as it unfolds. That I […]

Categories: Art, Teaching • Tags: ableism, academia, adjuncting, anxiety, aphantasia, art, borderline, burn out, embroidery, mental health, mental illness, neurodivergence, personal

Goodbye Drunken Boat, Hello Anomaly!

May 18, 2017 by E. Rowan

[Note: All documents quoted in this post are public record, comprising parts of the public non-profit corporation’s minutes, filed with the New York Secretary of State in accordance with state law and the corporation’s bylaws. All minutes of the corporation are available for public review upon request.] This is a post I really didn’t want to have to write. I believe firmly in restorative justice, and the possibility for healing and recovery within a community, despite harm done. But I also […]

Categories: Publishing, Uncategorized • Tags: abuse, Anomalous, Anomalous Press, anomaly25, drunken boat, drunken boat journal, ravi shankar, ravi shankar arrests, ravi shankar poet

Heavy Metal

April 21, 2017 by E. Rowan

I’m going to write a bit about something pretty personal here, which is a tad unusual. As many of my friends know, I became extremely ill in late September / early October of 2016. I had just moved back across country, from San Francisco to Providence, to teach Experimental Poets of Color at Brown. I loved being back at Brown, on the east coast, near family and friends. I was also teaching a poetry workshop for the super-rad Frequency Writers, and […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: copper toxicity, health, iud, iud copper toxicity, medical sexism, pain, personal, women, women's health

Leave a comment

Los Surcos del Azar

March 9, 2017 by E. Rowan

One of my very favorite things about translating is how hard it is. As any five translators to work on the same sentence and you’ll get five different results, all of them perfectly legitimate and yet none the same. There are a ton of great translation theorists who talk about this (many of whom I’ve been teaching this semester in the phenomenal translation theory class I’m doing with the Low Residency MFA in Literary Translation at Mills College!), but that […]

Categories: Translation • Tags: antonio machado, erica mena, literary translation, poetry, poetry translation, translation

Experimental Poets of Color

September 19, 2016 by E. Rowan

Up until a few years ago I thought I had to choose between being a “Puerto Rican poet” and being an “experimental poet.” Puerto Rican poets write about things like their abuela, or El Morro, o la isla, o salsa, o Nuevayork, o cualquier cosa. It probably didn’t help that the only Puerto Rican poet writing in English I knew, knew of, or had ever heard of was Martín Espada, whose work is exceptional and beautiful and extremely lyrical and more or less […]

Categories: Poetry, Teaching • Tags: experimental poetry, poetry, teaching

Leave a comment

How to Make A Difference

July 17, 2016 by E. Rowan

Yesterday the poet and artist Taylor Steele (who I’m fortunate enough to virtually know, and smart enough to admire fiercely) posted something that was like a fucking wake-up call. She pointed out, in a Facebook post inspired by Jayson Smith and Jayy Dodd, that the work of just surviving this world in a black body, much less thriving in it, creating, performing, and educating is immense, and almost always uncompensated. Because black people are subjected to unending violence, and then expected to […]

Categories: Art • Tags: activism, black lives matter, blm, fundblackfutures

Leave a comment

← Older posts