AYLING ZULEMA DOMINGUEZ is a poet, mixed media artist, and youth arts educator with roots in Puebla, México (Nahua) and República Dominicana. Grounded in an anticolonial poetics, their writing asks who we are at our most free, exploring the subversions and imaginings needed in order to arrive there. Ancestral veneration, Indigenous Futurisms, and communing with the archive are major themes in Ayling’s writing. What can language do for our resistance efforts? How can we use it to birth new worlds and weave our ancestors into the fabric of them? What to do with all this rage, sorrow, joy—all this inheritance? Their writing has recently been supported by Tin House, We Need Diverse Books, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Ayling continues to nurture community by hosting free monthly writing workshops online, installing interactive public artworks, and hyping up fellow poets at open mic joints.
The art that appears alongside this piece is by GRANT RAUN.
