Faculty Profile for Professor Kale Hensley

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Kale Hensley is a poet, visual artist, and educator whose work explores the intersections of queerness, spirituality, and hybrid literary forms. She teaches courses in composition at Texas State University, where she emphasizes writing as both a critical and creative practice. Her poetry and interdisciplinary work appear in Gulf Coast, Evergreen Review, BOOTH, and Epiphany, among other journals, and have been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is currently at work on a collection of poetry and visual art, and a novel loosely inspired by the life of St. Brigid of Kildare.

Research Interests

My research explores the intersections of lyricism, queerness, and spiritual inquiry across poetry, visual culture, and feminist speculative fiction. Rooted in a deep engagement with classical and medieval texts, my work traces how language, myth, and ritual structure both personal and collective memory. I am especially interested in hybrid forms—poetry-collage, lyric essay, and fragmentary narrative—as modes of resistance and revelation. My creative and scholarly practices often examine the poetics of the body, eco-spiritual grief, and gendered modes of devotion. Drawing from fields such as queer theory, theology, and visual studies, my research advocates for art as a form of wonder, witness, and reclamation.