heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (she/her) is a queer, disabled, Colombian/Latinx, poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. Her poetry collection, The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) won the 2018 Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She was a 2022 Zoeglossia Fellow, a 2021 Radar Fellow, a 2021 Mellon Arts Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration at Yale University, a 2019 CantoMundo Fellow, and a 2018 VONA alum. Her poetry has been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock’s Quarry, Nat.Brut, and Foglifter, among other places. She currently lives and teaches in southern California.

“Lorca’s own articulation of poetic force lives, not only in his poems and letters, but too, in his theory and play of duende, in the submission to a burning aliveness churning in our depths, thrashing against fascism’s death machine and its suffocations of queer desire, of life itself. We evade the grasp of total violence through Duende's “endless baptism of freshly created things.” This is poetry, this is its worldmaking insistence. It gives momentum, ritual, invitation, to the interdependencies we rely on and continue to cultivate, and I am always learning from, opening to, the splendor of saying yes to each other’s queer and neuro-wondrous becomings... This chapbook, Ephemeral, is my present offering, my hope to meet you there in the maybe and not-yet. Dear Stranger, I carry you in my heart and hunger, my thrashing, my tomorrow.”

- heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

Ayling Zulema Dominguez

Honorable mention Ayling Zulema Dominguez (she/they)(Como el Nopal) is a first-generation Chicana-Dominicana poet, collage artist, mixed media community artist, and youth arts educator from Bronx, NY. Her poetry and public art installations are rooted in radical love, and aimed at affirmation as a step towards liberation. She believes in art that offers protest and nurtures a search for wholeness outside of systems of oppression. Their work dares to ask community members, “Who are we at our most free?” Ayling currently teaches spoken word and visual art classes in public schools across the Bronx and Washington Heights. Select poems of hers have been published in No, Dear Magazine; Moko Magazine; La Galería Magazine; The Protest Review; Latino Rebels; Bronx Free Press; and Alegria Magazine’s Latinx Poetry Anthology.