Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, mixed media artist, and youth arts educator rooted in a poetics of anticolonial imagination. Their art and poetry ask who we are at our most free and what it might take to arrive there. Lyricality and reclamation of historically silenced voices and experiences inform their writing and artistry, as does abundance and collective care. They were a 2023 Prufer Poetry Prize Finalist, and received Honorable Mention for the 2022 Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize. They are an active mentee in the Latinx in Publishing Writers Mentorship Program. Select poems of theirs have been published in The Seventh Wave, No, Dear Magazine, Moko Magazine, Alegria Magazine’s Latinx Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. Their peoples are from Mexico and Dominican Republic. Ayling is currently pursuing an MFA at ASU. Ultimately, they believe in poetry as a tool for liberation.
Ayling was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative, in collaboration with Arizona State University – they were chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.