Daughter of Mexican and Afro-Mexican immigrants, great granddaughter of Indigenous women of the Americas, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell is an accomplished literary program curator and also a poet, writer, teaching artist, publisher, editorial and interior designer, photographer, musician, community & arts advocate, instigator, agitator, indefinite volunteer, forever student, and cultural wanderer who for over 20 years has built a career centered on exploring the liminal intersections of art and personal narrative, and how those are affected by and inform the spaces we occupy and exist in. She regularly curates interdisciplinary programming at Avenue 50 Studio, where she founded the Bluebird Reading series, and where she has participated in the curation of Poesia Para La Gente, a program that brings poetry to non-traditional spaces throughout Los Ángeles. It's also at Avenue 50 Studio, where the northeast L.A. chapter of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LÁTU) meets every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month. LÁTU is a tenant-centered movement fighting for the human right to housing for all.
Between 2014 and 2017, she was a partner at Writ Large Press (WLP), an indie press founded in 2007 to publish overlooked Los Angeles writers. Between 2013 to 2017, Jessica was a member of the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council, where she worked to support policy that considers community equitability & sustainability over disproportionate monetary advantage. She was also the chair of their Arts Committee, a member of their Outreach Committee, a Homelessness Liaison, and a Film Liaison through the City of L.Á's neighborhood Council Empowerment program. In addition to those roles, she has also facilitated workshops, worked in theatre for 10 years, spent a year or so in music promotion at American Records, and also worked in the literary department for the entirety of Michael Ovitz's infamous experiment known as Artist Management Group. Before embarking on the path that led her to her current journey, Jessica was founding principal of a design firm whose mission was to create beautiful and ecologically responsible interiors and furnishings that were accessible to everyone.
In 2015 she was awarded a Western States Arts Federation Emerging Leader of Color fellowship. In 2016 Jessica was selected as an Arts for LA ACTIVATE Cultural Policy Fellow. The culminating project she is still working on is a fully accessible, interactive and living data resource center that aims to bridge policy and the arts, by highlighting the existing ways artists participate in all aspects of civic engagement throughout the City of Los Angeles. The project was inspired by her commitment to learning news ways assets and resources can be shared across communities of color. In the past she's been recognized by the State of Alaska, the California State Assembly, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and Los Angeles Council Districts 1, 14 & 13 for her community work and arts advocacy. Together with and through Avenue 50 Studio she's been awarded grants from Council Districts 13 and 14, the LA Department of Cultural Affairs, the James Irvine Foundation, and collectively (with various artistic partnerships) she's been awarded grants for work across California. She's been invited to speak at numerous panels on issues related to poetry and place, editing, publishing, art & healing, place keeping [and making], and community building. In 2017, Jessica co-founded and co-produced, with the Latino Arts Network, the first annual Latina Writers Conference, then known as the Gathering of Latina Writers. Now in its second year, the 2018 Latina Writers Conference has grown to include over 30 participating panelists and workshop facilitators, engaging over 400 attendees - with plans to expand nationally. In 2019, she opened Alternative Field, a literary organization at the intersection of social justice, employing poetry and literary arts to bring awareness to and to exercise thought around issues that are central to our existence and to our potential.
Her written work has been published in various journals, anthologies and collective works such as Only Light Can Do That: 100 Post Election Poems, Stories, & Essays (PEN Center USA, Rattling Wall), Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles (Tia Chucha Press), Bird Float, Tree Song (Silverton Books), ATTN: (Further Other Book Works), Brooklyn & Boyle, Heartbreak Anthology, Entropy, Cultural Weekly, Los Angeles Magazine, Hinchas de Poesia, La Boga, and the Haight Ashbury Journal among others, in addition to public installations throughout Los Ángeles and San Diego. She's published three chapbooks, Gent/Re De Place Ing (2016) is a hybrid of material reflecting on art's connection to gentrification; End of the Road (2017), a collection of poetry created as response to photos and music suggestions from friends, composed while traveling from Los Angeles to Seattle in February of 2014, and Facilitating Spaces 101 (2018), part 1 in the "equity in community building: the arts" series which is intended to weave together three aspects of human agency and how we engage in community building in and through the arts: person, space, and intention.
Jessica has featured at various venues throughout Southern California, often performing with musical accompaniment, most recently with David Ornette Cherry, NK-Riot, El-Haru Kuroi, Taco Shop Poets & Los Illegals and an LA-based jazz trio at the Grand Park stage. She held a 3 month residency typing poems on demand during the opening months at the private nightclub Cloak & Dagger. In the past, she has worked as literary editor at Yay! L.A. Magazine, hosted a monthly reading at Beyond Baroque and has co-facilitated their 20th Century Latin American Poetry Workshop. Her written work has been incorporated into the curriculum at Cal State San Marcos and within UCLA’s Chicano Studies department.
Two collections of poetry are in-process, one that attempts to unbury, explore the challenges that circle the process of the being and becoming of "womxnhood," tentatively titled A woman was Earth, was a dolphin, was a man, was a lion, was a bird, was a mother's sin...before she was a womxn again. The other, titled Happiest Place on Earth, is a collection of poetry centered around a 1984 visit to Disneyland with her mother, while also living under foster care.
Jessica uses the gender pronouns she/her/they/them.
Between 2014 and 2017, she was a partner at Writ Large Press (WLP), an indie press founded in 2007 to publish overlooked Los Angeles writers. Between 2013 to 2017, Jessica was a member of the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council, where she worked to support policy that considers community equitability & sustainability over disproportionate monetary advantage. She was also the chair of their Arts Committee, a member of their Outreach Committee, a Homelessness Liaison, and a Film Liaison through the City of L.Á's neighborhood Council Empowerment program. In addition to those roles, she has also facilitated workshops, worked in theatre for 10 years, spent a year or so in music promotion at American Records, and also worked in the literary department for the entirety of Michael Ovitz's infamous experiment known as Artist Management Group. Before embarking on the path that led her to her current journey, Jessica was founding principal of a design firm whose mission was to create beautiful and ecologically responsible interiors and furnishings that were accessible to everyone.
In 2015 she was awarded a Western States Arts Federation Emerging Leader of Color fellowship. In 2016 Jessica was selected as an Arts for LA ACTIVATE Cultural Policy Fellow. The culminating project she is still working on is a fully accessible, interactive and living data resource center that aims to bridge policy and the arts, by highlighting the existing ways artists participate in all aspects of civic engagement throughout the City of Los Angeles. The project was inspired by her commitment to learning news ways assets and resources can be shared across communities of color. In the past she's been recognized by the State of Alaska, the California State Assembly, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and Los Angeles Council Districts 1, 14 & 13 for her community work and arts advocacy. Together with and through Avenue 50 Studio she's been awarded grants from Council Districts 13 and 14, the LA Department of Cultural Affairs, the James Irvine Foundation, and collectively (with various artistic partnerships) she's been awarded grants for work across California. She's been invited to speak at numerous panels on issues related to poetry and place, editing, publishing, art & healing, place keeping [and making], and community building. In 2017, Jessica co-founded and co-produced, with the Latino Arts Network, the first annual Latina Writers Conference, then known as the Gathering of Latina Writers. Now in its second year, the 2018 Latina Writers Conference has grown to include over 30 participating panelists and workshop facilitators, engaging over 400 attendees - with plans to expand nationally. In 2019, she opened Alternative Field, a literary organization at the intersection of social justice, employing poetry and literary arts to bring awareness to and to exercise thought around issues that are central to our existence and to our potential.
Her written work has been published in various journals, anthologies and collective works such as Only Light Can Do That: 100 Post Election Poems, Stories, & Essays (PEN Center USA, Rattling Wall), Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles (Tia Chucha Press), Bird Float, Tree Song (Silverton Books), ATTN: (Further Other Book Works), Brooklyn & Boyle, Heartbreak Anthology, Entropy, Cultural Weekly, Los Angeles Magazine, Hinchas de Poesia, La Boga, and the Haight Ashbury Journal among others, in addition to public installations throughout Los Ángeles and San Diego. She's published three chapbooks, Gent/Re De Place Ing (2016) is a hybrid of material reflecting on art's connection to gentrification; End of the Road (2017), a collection of poetry created as response to photos and music suggestions from friends, composed while traveling from Los Angeles to Seattle in February of 2014, and Facilitating Spaces 101 (2018), part 1 in the "equity in community building: the arts" series which is intended to weave together three aspects of human agency and how we engage in community building in and through the arts: person, space, and intention.
Jessica has featured at various venues throughout Southern California, often performing with musical accompaniment, most recently with David Ornette Cherry, NK-Riot, El-Haru Kuroi, Taco Shop Poets & Los Illegals and an LA-based jazz trio at the Grand Park stage. She held a 3 month residency typing poems on demand during the opening months at the private nightclub Cloak & Dagger. In the past, she has worked as literary editor at Yay! L.A. Magazine, hosted a monthly reading at Beyond Baroque and has co-facilitated their 20th Century Latin American Poetry Workshop. Her written work has been incorporated into the curriculum at Cal State San Marcos and within UCLA’s Chicano Studies department.
Two collections of poetry are in-process, one that attempts to unbury, explore the challenges that circle the process of the being and becoming of "womxnhood," tentatively titled A woman was Earth, was a dolphin, was a man, was a lion, was a bird, was a mother's sin...before she was a womxn again. The other, titled Happiest Place on Earth, is a collection of poetry centered around a 1984 visit to Disneyland with her mother, while also living under foster care.
Jessica uses the gender pronouns she/her/they/them.