writing wild. writing holy. writing free.
mai cortez doan is a writer, author, and certified grief and death doula. mai creates spaces for processing grief and teaches writing as a creative practice to deepen self-connection and reclaim 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
“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
