Centa Therese

Centa Therese is a poet, photoartist, and interdisciplinary educator whose work weaves together language, body, and image to illuminate the mysteries of the human experience. Therese received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an interdisciplinary M.A. in Creative Writing and Studio Art from Sonoma State University. She has since taught art, movement, and poetry to marginalized populations while developing her own art and writing.

Her publications include the myth of me (Kelsay Books, 2025); The Illuminated Field: cultivating a small world (Clamshell Press—limited edition, 2014); and Blameless Recognition of Natural Light (Clamshell Press—limited edition). She also edited Becoming Athena: Poems by Women in Recovery (2024), a collection of poems by women newly in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, shaped through a weekly writing circle she facilitated.

Her prose-poem manuscript Night Gardening is currently seeking a publisher; its title poem is forthcoming in Ploughshares (Spring 2026). Most recently, she alchemizes iPhone photos, has been learning meter and form in poetry, and tends to her three cats.

Her work can also be found at centatherese.com and centatheresestudios.com.