writing wild. writing holy. writing free.
mai c. doan is a poet, writer, and grief worker rooted in ancestral and earth-based spiritual practice. They 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.
mai is currently a UETF Residency Artist exploring grief, writing, and storytelling as fertile and necessary ground for strengthening our individual and collective capacity to engage with the most urgent callings of our rapidly changing times.
mai is the author of water/tongue, a 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. They live in Albuquerque, NM with their dog, Story.
water/tongue
A 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist
The dead are more alive than the living and I want to know why.
“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 she would rather stutter than be folded into the Empire. Here is a poetics of of the trace. Language becomes a placeholder for what cannot be said. 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.” - Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism
