“A question my work is asking of the reader is do you want to be healed and how? How do you heal? Who do you walk alongside when you walk with your community?”

“I approach the page every time knowing I choose to speak, I choose to share my truth, and there is always space, time, and an audience that are seeking and needing voices like mine.”

“Once I stopped externalizing my need to have my aspirations validated, I could put all of that energy back into the work.”

“How can we wrap our heads around loss when it is an ongoing process? How can we find joy in the aftermath of or during survival?”

“I have tried not writing about my women, my identity, etc., but that never works out. Instead I’m leaning into it, generating poems about deshi womanhood.”

“For me, writing is intense somatic work; art is about restoring, playing, and opening up.”

“The body is one of the best ways to express yourself, existing within the push and pull to exist in its natural state or change to your liking.”

“That is how the short story feels to me — tightly constructed narrative where details inevitably get shuffled around with some that get left behind.”

“I can only keep writing and hope that whatever comes out reaches anyone else who needs to hear the same words.”

“A poem to me is like a small cat that curls itself around your legs as you wait for the bus.”

“Writing is a documented journey of self-growth as well as a way to be seen and heard.”

“My work is agitational and energized toward transformation and hope—I build worlds deeply rooted in liberation and decolonial imaginings.”

“I bring into the room my family and relatives first and always. They are who have shaped me. My ancestors too.”

“Sometimes the most intimate and powerful work lies in the things that remain private and inaccessible for public gaze.”

“Through the safe and tender space of the residency, I found a new approach to my art-making: writing as a gift to my reader.”