Manya Yana Campos is a poet, producer, story-keeper and cultural curator whose work is deeply rooted in ancestry and place. Throughout her writing, identity is not presented as a fixed category but as a living inheritance carried through food, language, land, family, and ritual. She traces her lineage through Mexican, Indigenous, and immigrant histories, weaving together memories of blue corn tortillas, wood smoke, handmade cheese, sugarcane fields, Russian cigarettes, and the voices of mothers, grandmothers, and sisters. Her poems suggest a person who experiences culture not as nostalgia but as something embodied and alive, carried forward through daily acts of remembrance and creation.
A recurring theme in Manya's work is the preservation of stories. Hair becomes a symbol of lineage, connection, and survival; braids are described as rivers connecting generations of women across time. Family recipes, spiritual practices, gardens, and kitchens become archives of memory. Again and again, she returns to the idea that culture survives because people actively tend to it. Her writing honors women in particular—whose knowledge is often passed down quietly through food, touch, and tradition rather than institutions.
At the same time, Manya directly confronts racism, displacement, and the ways communities are taught to diminish themselves in order to survive. She speaks candidly about the experience of growing up between cultures, witnessing prejudice, and carrying inherited trauma. Her work focuses on healing, belonging, and reclaiming identity. To Manya, ‘home’ is not passive or abstract. It is found in community, self-acceptance, cultural pride, and the refusal to allow fear or shame to dictate one's future.
As the co-owner of Tlalli, a Mesoamerican kitchen located in Ashland, Oregon, Manya has created more than a restaurant; she has created a gathering place. Food, hospitality, and storytelling come together in a way that mirrors the themes found throughout her poetry. At the center of both her writing and her work is a commitment to helping people feel rooted, nourished, and connected—to themselves, to one another, and to the stories that brought them here.
