Poet, professor, and editor, fahima ife is the author of Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021), praised in the New York Times Book Review, and Septet for the Luminous Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and Big Other Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, mercury firs, Obsidian, Air/Light, Indiana Review, Interim, Tilted House, The Rumpus, and other places. She writes toward radical self-love. Her practice is somatic. She writes from the wild feminine, the intuitive, instinctive aspects of her womanhood which drives her full creative force. She frequently engages themes of intimacy, ancestry, spirituality, grief, anger, joy, love, nature, myth, shadow, light, sensuality, friendship, and family.

She was born and raised in Southern California (the Inland Empire) in a mystical, mixed-race, working-class Indigenous family whose ancestry originates in Benin, Nigeria, Mali, Europe, Cameroon, Senegal, and First Nations before chattel enslavement in the Americas and Caribbean. She currently lives on the Central California Coast within ancestral airs of the Ohlone.

From 2016-2022 she was an assistant professor at Louisiana State University in the Department of English. In 2022 she joined the University of California Santa Cruz as an associate professor of Aesthetics & Poetics in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. She teaches classes on Poetry & Poetics, Music and Performance, Black Aesthetics in Pop Cultural and Experimental Indie Art, and Indigenous Feminisms.

With Ian U Lockaby she co-created and co-edits the poetry micropress LUCIUS.