Born and raised in the northeast area of Tovaangar (Los Ángeles) and weekends and summers in the San Gabriel Valley, Jessica Ceballos (y Campbell) is the daughter of Afro-Iberian-Indigenous-migrants of the "Americas" [Wixárika] and is an accomplished content creator, literary program curator, editor, publisher, designer, community organizer, arts advocate, instigator, agitator, forever student, and cultural wanderer who for over 20 years has built a career centered on exploring the intersections of art, media, and personal narrative, and how those are affected by and inform the spaces individuals and communities occupy and exist in. Her experiences working within a spectrum of organizations, systems, and collectives continue to inform her life and work as a mother, partner, and artist.
She has regularly curated 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) currently 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 of the 90s in music promotion at American Records, and also worked in entertainment management and development for the entirety of Michael Ovitz's experiment known as Artist Management Group. Before embarking on the path that led her to her current journey, Jessica was founding principal of an interior design firm that focused on beautiful, ecologically responsible, and entirely accessible furnishings and interiors.
Her intersectional work in arts administration and community organizing led to her being awarded a Western States Arts Federation Emerging Leader of Color Fellowship (2015), where she currently serves on the Advisory Committee. In 2016, Jessica was selected as an Arts for LA ACTIVATE Cultural Policy Fellow. The culminating project she is dreaming of pursuing in the near future 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 within the City of Los Angeles. The project was inspired by her commitment to learning new 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. She's been awarded grants (individually and collectively) from Council Districts 13 and 14, the LA Department of Cultural Affairs, Poets & Writers, Cal Humanities, The Mellon Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and through partnerships 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. In its second year, the 2018 Latina Writers Conference grew to include over 30 participating panelists and workshop facilitators, engaging over 500 attendees. In 2019, she found a physical home for Alternative Field, a literary 501c(3) organization at the intersection of social justice, employing poetry to bring awareness to and exercise thought around issues that are central to our existence and to our potential. In 2022, she proudly joined the board of Women Who Submit, an organization that creates physical and virtual spaces for sharing information, supporting and encouraging submissions to literary journals, and clarifying the submission and publication process for women and nonbinary writers.
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.
She has regularly curated 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) currently 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 of the 90s in music promotion at American Records, and also worked in entertainment management and development for the entirety of Michael Ovitz's experiment known as Artist Management Group. Before embarking on the path that led her to her current journey, Jessica was founding principal of an interior design firm that focused on beautiful, ecologically responsible, and entirely accessible furnishings and interiors.
Her intersectional work in arts administration and community organizing led to her being awarded a Western States Arts Federation Emerging Leader of Color Fellowship (2015), where she currently serves on the Advisory Committee. In 2016, Jessica was selected as an Arts for LA ACTIVATE Cultural Policy Fellow. The culminating project she is dreaming of pursuing in the near future 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 within the City of Los Angeles. The project was inspired by her commitment to learning new 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. She's been awarded grants (individually and collectively) from Council Districts 13 and 14, the LA Department of Cultural Affairs, Poets & Writers, Cal Humanities, The Mellon Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and through partnerships 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. In its second year, the 2018 Latina Writers Conference grew to include over 30 participating panelists and workshop facilitators, engaging over 500 attendees. In 2019, she found a physical home for Alternative Field, a literary 501c(3) organization at the intersection of social justice, employing poetry to bring awareness to and exercise thought around issues that are central to our existence and to our potential. In 2022, she proudly joined the board of Women Who Submit, an organization that creates physical and virtual spaces for sharing information, supporting and encouraging submissions to literary journals, and clarifying the submission and publication process for women and nonbinary writers.
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.