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 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 a child of the earth, sun, and stars. I am healing and finding my way back into my voice, truth, and power.

I am made of the memories of the earth and stories of my ancestors. In my heart is the vastness of the ocean, fields of wild flowers, and a sky full of stars. I take baths and lay in the moonlight to remember myself. And when my mind drops down into the space of my heart, I float through my own sea. I feel my own rhythms and waves. I feel the fullness of both my grief and my joy. And I continue to swim. I continue to make room.

My Background and Experience

I have been teaching writing and storytelling as a healing, creative, and spiritual practice since 2008. I have taught workshops to youth and adults around radical dreaming, writing with ancestors, queer and trans BIPOC poetry, altar making, and more. My work is shaped and inspired by the queer, femme, disabled, and BIPOC people and communities that have loved, held, and grown me throughout my life, and is informed by anti-oppression, trauma-informed, and popular education models and practice.

In addition, I hold over fifteen years of experience working in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors, specifically in youth leadership development and gender, racial, and reproductive justice. Through this work, I’ve developed and managed intersectional leadership development programs with a strong healing and creative focus as well as participatory grant-making programs centering queer and trans BIPOC youth and adults.

I am 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. I am an award winning poet and have published and performed my work through the National Queer Arts Festival, RADAR Productions, the Poetry Project, and more. My first full-length book, water/tongue, was a 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Bisexual Poetry.

A​s 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 continue to evolve in being and practice through the guidance and mentorship of my beloved teachers and the earth. I approach this work and path with deep gratitude, humility, and love. I am grateful for the friends, teachers, and ancestors whose love, wisdom, and affirmation support me along the way.

To get in touch, email me at hello@maicortezdoan.com.