Writing ourselves into a new story.

Welcome! I’m mai. I’m a poet, author, facilitator, and grief worker based in Albuquerque, NM.

​I write and work with the earth to facilitate healing and to guide and inspire others to connect to their creative capacity to live, heal, and transform.

I have dedicated my life to healing intergenerational trauma by writing a new story.

I look forward to connecting and sharing this practice with you.

I write about and offer support in:

  • Intergenerational Trauma

  • Environmental and Climate Grief

  • Creative Stuckness and Blocks

  • Loss, Death, Grief, and Transition

Who I Work With
& Write For:

Artists, poets, writers, and heart workers; farmers, gardeners, and stewards of the earth; story weavers, deep feelers, hard femmes. People who dream. People with multiple and intersecting identities, people with chronic illness and disability, people who are breaking familial and cultural norms. Queer, trans, and nonbinary people. People recovering from trauma. People with a fire in their heart; people with a butterfly in their throat.

water/tongue

A 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Poetry

“In a slim volume of tightly worded poems, Doan has created a framework through which to view her own processing of intergenerational trauma. Doan’s terse poetry marks a personal catharsis even as it steals its resolve by calling out the postcolonial suffering still felt in younger generations."

- Booklist

Recent Desert Letters

  • Cycles of Living and Change

    When change is hard, it’s easy to forget our sense of connection. We believe we are singular and alone. But we are always being held by our inherent connection to a vast and infinite system of life growing towards more life.

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  • Seeds of Grief

    Seeds are the material through which life not only continues but evolves. If we think about grief as a seed, what does that change in how we orient to our grief? And what kind of potential would live within these tiny, primordial pods?

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  • Turning to the Earth in Grief

    Our experiences of loss and grief have the potential to expand our awareness and connect us back to the universal cycles and the bigger-than-us wisdom and intelligence that is constantly unfolding within and around us.

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