Jessica Doe (née Mehta, Tyner), PhD is an Aniyunwiya inter/multi/anti-disciplinary poet, artist, and scholar. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, but born on the northwest region of Turtle Island (fka Oregon in the United States), space, place, and Indigenization are driving forces in her work, which has been described as avant-garde conceptualism. Jessica’s doctoral research focused on the intersection of female poetry and eating disorders with an emphasis on Sylvia Plath. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Bengaluru, India, she curated an anthology of contemporary Indian poetry written in the colonizer’s tongue.

Jessica has undertaken poetry and artist residencies around the globe including at Hosking Houses Trust with an appointment at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-Upon-Avon (England), at the Penington Friends House in Manahatta (fka New York City) with a Bayard Rustin post, and at the Crazy Horse Memorial on Oceti Sakowin territory. Her work has been featured at galleries and exhibitions around the world, including the Asheville Art Museum on ancestral Aniyunwiya lands, The Emergency Gallery in Sweden, and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Oga Po’geh, land of the Tewa/Tanos (fka Santa Fe, New Mexico).

Artist statement: "I consider it my responsibility to use my platforms and work as a means for amplifying Native voices and realities. Such a responsibility, which comes with ample emotional, mental, spiritual, and sometimes physical labor, is not one that should be inherently placed upon Indigenous People. It is, however, one that I have chosen to bear, and it is tempered with self-care with an emphasis on ahimsa. I create experiences for sparking discourse and highlighting the authenticities and histories prevalent to both NDN country and everyone across Turtle Island ... and the world. Every project I undertake, no matter the medium, addresses Native Truths. This ranges from disparities and issues like the history of “Indian” residential boarding "schools" (of which my father survived, at least physically) to addressing how the disproportionate number of Native children in foster care today is an extension of sorts to the assimilation and erasure goals of those institutions from our not-so-distant past. My own children are from the Oglala Lakota Nation and were adopted via foster care, which further cements my commitment to radical decolonization. My work is inherently personal, stemming from my own life and those of my ancestors. Identity and reconnecting with the Self in a continuously colonizing world are recurring themes."

Her poetry collection When We Talk of Stolen Sisters (2021) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards while her collection Selected Poems: 2000-2020 was awarded the 2020 Birdy Publication Prize from Meadowlark Books. Jessica’s poetry collection Savagery (2019) received gold from the 2020 Book Excellence Awards and Reader View Literary Awards. Her novel The Wrong Kind of Indian (2017) won gold at the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs), at the American Book Fest, and was named the Human Relations Indie Book Awards Cultural Awareness Book of the Year. Jessica has also received numerous fellowships in recent years, including the Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington and the Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship at The British Library in London. She is regularly featured at events around the world, such as the US State Department’s National Poetry Month event “Poets as Cultural Emissaries: A Conversation with Women Writers” as well as the “Women’s Transatlantic Prison Activism Since 1960” symposium at Oxford University. Her full CV is available here.

Jessica is also an experienced registered yoga instructor (ERYT-500®), registered children’s yoga teacher (RCYT®), registered prenatal yoga teacher (RPYT®), registered yin yoga teacher, registered aerial yoga teacher, certified Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Provider (YACEP®), certified in Reiki I and II, and is a NASM-certified personal trainer (CPT).