writing wild. writing holy. writing free.
mai cortez doan is a poet, writer, and facilitator. Her work focuses on grief, truth telling, ecological change, and being in relationship with the natural world.
mai writes and teaches writing as a creative and contemplative practice to deepen self-connection and affirm our inherent belonging to ourselves, our stories, and the earth.
She lives in Albuquerque, NM with her dog, Story.
water/tongue
A 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Poetry
“A compelling examination of the diasporic body in an uncertain landscape, water/tongue enacts the ancestral, the matriarchal, and the ritual by way of witnessing the self. Through a critique of the ever permanent and devastating effects of colonialism, water/tongue gifts the reader with a resilient voice seeking out truths in the historical to question why ‘the dead are more alive than the living.’ These carefully crafted lines embody a language of remembrance that becomes a way of holding space for the living and for the dead, ‘until the dead is swept up / until the dead is not / dead anymore.’”— Mai Der Vang, author of Afterland
