Revilla, Noʻu

Noʻu Revilla is an ʻŌiwi poet and educator. She was born and raised on the island of Maui and currently lives on Oʻahu, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her debut collection, Ask the Brindled (Milkweed), was selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series. In it, she grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page red – for desire, love, and generations of blood spilled by colonizers. She hides knives in her hair “the way my grandmother – not god – / the way my grandmother intended.” Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi with contemporary experiences of queer love and queer grief, Revilla writes about sovereignty: linguistic, erotic, and civic. Through the formal dynamism and the material of ʻŌiwi culture and mythos, this living text both condemns and creates. Ask the Brindled is a song from a 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 an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives imposed upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.