kalilinoe detwiler
As a Kanaka ʻŌiwi artist and scholar, Kalilinoe Detwiler explores paths of cultural perseverance by expressing ancestral knowledge in the present through creative media and writing. By writing with place and honoring that which she learns from kumu through kilo, she continues to work on productions that center Kanaka ʻŌiwi cultural practitioners and imagine Indigenous futures. She is pursuing an English Ph.D. at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa where she will further develop her responsibility to Hawaiʻi through research on ʻŌiwi rhetorics, interdisciplinary storytelling, and Indigenous frameworks of analysis that sustain ʻŌiwi ways of knowing and being.
Kalilinoe Detwiler is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi artist and writer who grew up observing the clouds move across the island of Oʻahu from her home in Makakilo. Kalilinoe explores her relationship with ʻāina and looks for ways to express ancestral knowledge in the present with projects that fall at the cross point of many disciplines and artistic forms. She graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa with a Bachelor of Arts from the Academy of Creative Media with a focus in animation, a Bachelor of Arts in English, and a Master of Arts in English with a focus in cultural studies and rhetoric.
She was selected for the Māhealani Dudoit Artist's Residency with Hawaiʻi Review, where she continues to work as part of the editorial board and design lead. In addition, she is training as an evaluator and grant-writer with the non-profit Huli Mauli Ola.
In 2020, she published her first essay, "Contemporary Moʻolelo: Filling the Literature Stream with Pacific Water" in Mānoa Horizons Journal vol 5. Her short story Huli placed 3rd for the Patsy Sumie Saiki Prize (UHM 2021) and the Robbie Shapard Short-Short Story Prize (2021). First We Helumoa won the Best Micro-Short Collaboration Prize (UHM 2022), The Tops of Waikiki was awarded the 1st Place Patsy Sumie Saiki Award (UHM 2022) and published in the Yellow Medicine Review Fall 2023 issue, and Face Down in the Sand was awarded UHM's The Academy of American Poets Prize (2022). In 2022, she was selected as part of the inaugural cohort of poets for the Indigenous Nation's Poets program, hosted by the Library of Congress in D.C., and later honored by Counsel Member Radiant Cordero at the June 2022 City Counsel Meeting.
She works as an animator on Indigenous films and projects for nonprofits and local initiatives, including the short film Kapo Mai Lele and a movement of the Symphony for the Hawaiʻi Forests. She is completing the festival run for her short film, Pua Ka Uahi, which showed at 14 Film Festivals including the National Museum of the American Indian Native Cinema Showcase, Prague International Film Festival, Hawaiʻi International Film Festival, and Wairoa Māori Film Festival.
She is a Ph.D. student of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa writing stories and poetry that reimagine Hawaii’s present and future, as well as develop frameworks of analysis for Hawaiʻi texts to sustain Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Kalilinoe has worked as a Graduate Assistant with the Department of English as an Instructor of English Composition, a Graduate Research Assistant with the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences as a storyteller for the Symphony of Hawaiʻi Seas, and currently serves as a Graduate Assistant with the Department of Social Work and the Barbara Cox Anthony Endowment. All of her work –– her writing, research, art, and studies –– are a part of the responsibility and privilege of being raised by Hawaiʻi. Integral to her process is the ōlelo noʻeau, ma ka hana ka ʻike, because knowledge is learned, embodied, and perpetuated in the doing. She is most thankful to her kumu (ʻāina, cultural practitioners, Kumu, friends, and kupuna, to name a few) who guide and lend her stories power.