r. Jennifer Lisa Vest is a mixedblood (Black/ Indian) poet and philosopher originally from Chicago, Illinois (USA). She teaches philosophy and Women’s Studies as an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy department at the University of Central Florida (Orlando). She has published articles on African, Indigenous, Caribbean, and feminist philosophy and is currently writing a book on Academic Native American philosophy.

She obtained her Ph.D. from the Ethnic Studies Dept at U.C. Berkeley where she wrote a dissertation on Indigenous Native American and African philosophies. She has had her poetry published in a variety of anthologies and journals including the Canadian Journal of Native Studies and the African American Review, and has produced three poetry CDs of her work. More recently, she had begun to combine the two genres of philosophy and poetry into a new field she calls “philopoetics.”