Amaris Feland Ketcham is a writer, comics artist, and interdisciplinary educator whose work investigates how place makes us human. She has written two poetry books, A Poetic Inventory of the Sandia Mountains and Glitches in the FBI and edited A Year of New Mexico Poetry. Her other books include a camping guide, Best Tent Camping: New Mexico and a graphic memoir, Unfiltered: A Cancer Year Diary. She regularly writes about comics and interviews comics artists for Autobiographix (autobiographix.substack.com). Through the Arts-in-Medicine program at the University of New Mexico Cancer Center, Amaris facilitates creative encounters with patients, caregivers, and medical personnel. Amaris teaches with the University of New Mexico Honors College, where she is the faculty advisor for the nationally acclaimed arts and literature magazine Scribendi. In addition to the ins and outs of literary publishing, she teaches creative writing, nonfiction and poetry comics, handmade books and zines, forest bathing, and creative placemaking. 

During her tenure as a Fulbright distinguished scholar, Amaris will be working with the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. There, she will pair archival work with plein air drawing fieldwork at beaches, lochs, and swimming clubs, translating environmental psychology and medical-humanities research into accessible nonfiction comics for a book length graphic memoir, “Sea Cure: Centuries of Healing on Scottish Shores.”  This research project will examine how Scotland’s green and blue places support wellbeing—from Victorian hydrotherapies to today’s wild swimming and forest bathing. In addition to research and drafting, she will meet with local comics artists, give public talks, and host graphic medicine workshops focused on wellbeing derived from experience in natural spaces.