CYNTHIA DEWI OKA (Dewi, prounced “Deh-wee”) is a poet, writer, and facilitator originally from Bali, Indonesia. Her family migrated to Vancouver, Unceded Coast Salish Territory when she was 10 years old, and she is currently based in Chicago, Unceded Lands of the Council of the Three Fires (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations).

Dewi has authored four acclaimed poetry collections: A Tinderbox in Three Acts, published by BOA Editions in 2022; Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) published by Northwestern University Press; and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water, published by Thread Makes Blanket in 2016. Among other distinctions, she has been awarded the Amy Clampitt Residency, Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award, and the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize.

Dewi earned her MFA at Warren Wilson College, and has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, the University of New Mexico, and The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension. She has been a featured poet on stages across the US, as well as internationally, including at The Brooklyn Rail, Busboys and Poets, the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, and institutions including Princeton, NYU, the New School, and UPenn.

In 2025, Dewi served as Visiting Writer at the Vermont Studio Center and for PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellows. Currently, she is working on a new poetry manuscript and her memoir.

For fifteen years, Dewi worked in national organizations and grassroots social movements for gender, racial, economic, and climate justice as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser. Most recently, she served as Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine, a literary publication that focuses on international policy.

In her facilitation work, Dewi partners with organizations like Blue Stoop, Voices of Our Nations (VONA), and Anaphora Arts, among others, to offer creative writing workshops that prioritize the Global Majority and are rooted in decolonial, ancestral, and Earth-centered perspectives. She also offers manuscript consultations for poets working on book-length projects.

As an immigrant and former young single mother with working-class roots, Dewi’s life and work are guided by her core values: self-determination, collaboration, and attention to the peripheral. She creates to be of service to Mother Earth and to future generations.