writing wild. writing holy. writing free.
mai cortez doan is a writer, facilitator, and grief worker. She creates community spaces that restore self-connection and return us to our inherent belonging — to ourselves, our stories, and the earth.
mai works with grief, writing, and storytelling as fertile and necessary ground for strengthening our personal and collective capacity to engage with the most potent callings of our rapidly changing times. Additionally, through writing and grief work, mai teaches how being in relationship with the natural world can support us through loss, death, and change.
She lives in Albuquerque, NM with her dog, Story and is deeply in love with the earth.
water/tongue
A 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Poetry
“How many ways can we be killed by being forced to fit into a world we didn’t ask for? Here is a poetics of of the trace, of the unpronounced events reverberating on a sparsely marked page, in the space between the cracked house that leaks memory: a girl running. What is the speaker to do with the weight of what her ancestors have lived through? Repatriate the severed tongue. Build a politics of ritual, of hair and rose petals at the bottom of an empty bathtub. mai c. doan’s powerful book water/tongue is written from the position of being in, but not of, this monstrosity we call America. And they would rather stutter than be folded into the Empire."
- Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism
Upcoming Events
a space for writing and processing grief
online via zoom | starting May 2025
dear grief is for anyone seeking community and guided practice around grief. all are welcome <3
dear grief
