Amanda Chiado

Amanda Chiado (key-ah-doe) is a writer, poet, teacher, and arts advocate. She holds degrees from the University of New Mexico, California College of the Arts, and Grand Canyon University. Amanda is the author of the chapbooks Prime Cuts (Bottlecap Press, 2025) and Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her poetry and fiction have been published in DMQ Review, The Account, Southeast Review, RHINO, and others. She is an alumna of the Community of Writers and the Highlights Foundation. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the Director of Arts Education at the San Benito County Arts Council, is a California Poet in the Schools, and edits for Jersey Devil Press. She's passionate about birds, horror movies, ballet, magic, and laughter. She lives in Hollister, California, with her husband, son, daughter, and mother.

Praise for Today I Wear the Bear Head

Amanda Chiado’s dazzling prose poetry collection lures us into her fascinating secret world of wonder, magic, haunting beauty, persistent memory, fantasy. We are left in awe, grateful for the ardent turns and surprises: the exquisite journey. This is one of my favorite prose poetry collections from an exciting and new master of the form. This spellbinding book will leave you charmed and entranced yet still wanting more of the exhilarating experience of reading a prose poem by Amanda Chiado. Well done, poet!

─Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man

By turns surreal, playful, and tenderly lyrical, the poems in Today I Wear the Bear Head move like dreams—fast-paced fever dreams. One minute you’re a teenager at a carnival and a knife fight breaks out, the next you’re playing dodgeball, or at the bottom of a pool admiring a nativity scene, or pregnant with a ghost. A chorus of babies appear—vulnerable, needy, and forlorn. Like dreams and nightmares, Chiado’s poems offer surprise after surprise of imagery, of language, and of transformation. So many masks, costumes, and disguises appear in this book. The poems explore what’s hidden underneath and invite the reader to come and see.

─Kathleen McGookey, author of Paper Sky: Prose Poems

Amanda Chiado writes like someone who has seen the inside of the family myth and decided to make it weirder, funnier, and more sacred. Today I Wear the Bear Head is hilarious and dark—full of masks, monsters, mothers, and the kind of tenderness that bites. With language that is lush, Chiado reimagines motherhood and grief as transformation. This is a collection for anyone who has ever tried to survive anything—the body, family, love.

—Shivani Mehta, author of The Required Assembly: Prose Poems

Today I Wear the Bear Head is a poetic tour de force, an extraordinary trip through a constellation of personas: some personal, some imaginary, some dropped from another universe. Nightgowns and bathtubs argue over how to hold a pregnant body. A bearded lady memorizes sex limericks for her date with Van Gogh. Tiny men attempt to inhabit a uterus. “‘Just open the doors,’ they holler.” Amanda Chiado’s wildly associative images and visceral descriptions are both devastating and beautiful. Often macabre, but always revelatory, each poem is a mysterious little treasure. Now, stop whatever you’re doing. Go read this book.

—Nancy Miller Gomez, Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, and author of Inconsolable Objects