As a writer and multidisciplinary artist, Amaris explores the combination of text, image, and place. She has written two poetry books, A Poetic Inventory of the Sandia Mountains and Glitches in the FBI; a camping guide to New Mexico, Best Tent Camping: New Mexico; and a graphic novel, Unfiltered: A Cancer Year Diary. She edits and writes for Autobiographix, a newsletter about nonfiction comics.
Amaris volunteers with the Arts-in-Medicine program at the University of New Mexico Cancer Center, where she facilitates creative encounters with patients, caregivers, and medical personnel. In waiting rooms and infusion suites, she engages patients in poetry and drawing activities as a way of enhancing medical care through imagination and expression.
Her work with Poetic Routes, an interactive poetic cartography of Albuquerque, was adopted by the Albuquerque City Planning Department as a way to use poetry as a means of understanding neighborhoods and community character throughout town.
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 teaching the ins and outs of literary publishing, she teaches creative writing, nonfiction and poetry comics, handmade books and zines, forest bathing, and creative placemaking. She has painted murals throughout Albuquerque, acted in a radio drama about the Badlands National Park, and taken students on multi-week camping trips along the Lewis and Clark Trail in North Dakota and Montana.
Research interests: creative writing (creative nonfiction, narrative journalism, and poetry), nonfiction and poetry comics, zines and handmade books, place as text, and creative placemaking.