In my heart is the truth of who I am and the seeds of my becoming. I am the vastness of the ocean. I am old growth forest and ancient rock. I am an ancestor of the stars. I am an expansive, multidimensional, complex human being seeking to live my life fully and with heart. I am constantly learning how to love myself better and to create my life with love. I am a shape-shifting creature who has made a home of the liminal and in-between. I transcend binaries, boxes, and blocks in imagination. I am constantly evolving, and growing into my own truth, voice, and power. It is my capacity to love that makes me strong.

What I Do

Welcome! My name is mai. I’m a writer, facilitator, and grief worker. I write and teach writing as a creative and contemplative practice to deepen self-connection and affirm our inherent belonging to ourselves, our stories, and the earth. I also facilitate community offerings for processing grief and teach how the natural world can support us through loss, death, and change. As a writer, facilitator, and grief worker, I integrate 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, and am becoming increasingly focused on climate grief, ecological loss, and how being in relationship with the natural world can teach us about living, dying, and moving with change. 

My approach is heart-centered, intersectional, and honors the inherent sovereignty and wisdom of all those who I work. As a life-long student, I continue to evolve in my being and practice under the love and guidance of my beloved teachers, mentors, and the earth. I approach this work and path with deep gratitude, humility, and love.

My Background and Experience

Writing is the blood, bone, and fire of my being. It is central to who I am and what I do. Writing, from the start, offered sanctuary and self-expression when the world around me couldn’t. I wrote my first poem. when I was nine years old, and published my first poem at sixteen. Since then, I have published and performed my work through the National Queer Arts Festival, the Poetry Project, RADAR Productions, LitQuake, and more. I hold an MFA in Poetry from Mills College, where I attended as a Community Engagement Fellow. As a fellow, I collaborated with local organizing projects such as Care Not Cops to bring reading, writing, and creating ritual with poetry into public space and political action. water/tongue, my first full-length poetry book, was published in 2019 and went on to become a Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Poetry in 2020.

Designing and facilitating community offerings is a beloved expression of my creative practice. I have over fifteen years of experience in training, facilitation, counseling, and program development in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors, specifically in youth leadership development, anti-violence work, and gender, racial, and reproductive justice, as well as in DIY and community-based settings. In 2008, I began designing and facilitating workshops at the intersection of healing, creative, and spiritual practice. I’ve led workshops on radical dreaming, writing with ancestors, QTBIPOC poetry and craft, altar making, and continue to teach writing for self-connection and creative expression. From 2014-2018, I ran my own reiki practice, through which I offered accessible, trauma-informed energy healing centering QT/BIPOC people and survivors of violence. In 2020, I trained and certified as a death doula and began to hold grief circles, facilitate writing workshops centered on grief, provide grief support to groups and individuals, and guide people in ritual and ceremony development to honor all forms of loss and change.

As a femme, Mexican and Vietnamese person living with chronic illness and C-PTSD, I am healing lived and intergenerational trauma by writing a new story. I am grateful for the friends, teachers, and ancestors whose love, wisdom, and affirmation support me along the way.

A full list of my work can be found here.