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. She writes toward radical self-possession and 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.

With Ian U Lockaby she co-created and co-edits the indie micropress LUCIUS for established and emerging high-frequency poetry and poetics.

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 in Santa Cruz, California.

Because she is interested in the human psyche, the collective unconsciousness, and how psychosomatic experience is embraced in educational settings, she began her academic training first in Psychology and continued in Education. She received her B.A. in Psychology from California State University San Bernardino in 2005. Her M.A.T. from Emory University in 2010. And a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction (with an emphasis in Languages, Literacies, and Cultures) from the School of Education with a minor in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. 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 Black Aesthetics & Poetics in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (and is affiliated with Literature) in the Humanities. She is also affiliated with Music in the Arts. She teaches classes on Poetry & Poetics, Music and Performance, Black Aesthetics in Pop Cultural and Experimental Indie Art, and Indigenous Feminisms.