photo credit: Melodee Solomon
mai c. doan is a writer, facilitator, and community grief care practitioner. mai works with grief as a doorway and a guide to more loving and life-affirming ways of being — with ourselves, each other, and the earth. She is a certified end-of-life doula and conscious dying coach, children’s bereavement facilitator with The Grief Center NM, and teaches grief stewardship through A Sacred Passing. She is an award winning poet and has published and performed her work through the National Queer Arts Festival, RADAR Productions, the Poetry Project, and more. Her first full-length book, water/tongue, was a 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Bisexual Poetry.
mai lives in Albuquerque, NM with her dog, Story, where they lovingly make home with the mountains and the moon.
Recent Blog Posts
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Cycles of Living and Change
When change is hard, it’s easy to forget our sense of connection. We believe we are singular and alone. But we are always being held by our inherent connection to a vast and infinite system of life growing towards more life.
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Seeds of Grief
Seeds are the material through which life not only continues but evolves. If we think about grief as a seed, what does that change in how we orient to our grief? And what kind of potential would live within these tiny, primordial pods?
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Turning to the Earth in Grief
Our experiences of loss and grief have the potential to expand our awareness and connect us back to the universal cycles and the bigger-than-us wisdom and intelligence that is constantly unfolding within and around us.
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
