Establishing and Reinforcing
a Community of Emerging Artists in NYC
AYESHA RAEES
Ayesha Raees is a poet, painter, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary artist focusing on displacement and belonging, decolonial, anti-violence, and collaborative practices, and everyday mundane softness. Identifying as a hybrid creating hybrid art from hybrid forms, Raees cultivates relationships between the word and image with the intention of breaking conventional ideas of linear language, form, and genre to create space of belonging for marginalia and their narratives.
Raees serves as a poetry editor at Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins. She holds fellowships and support from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, Brooklyn Poets, Millay Colony For the Arts, Cave Canem, Bennington College, University of Miami, and elsewhere. Her work has been displayed at Lahore Contemporary Museum of Art, the Institute for Experimental Arts in Athens, University of Miami’s Libraries, PatchWorks Gallery, Canvas Gallery, and elsewhere. Her first book of hybrid poetry, Coining A Wishing Tower, won the Broken River Prize hosted by Platypus Press in 2022 and was selected as one of the most commendable first collections by Forward Arts Foundation.
Born in Pakistan, Raees exists in fragments around the world, but for now, in New York City where she spends a lot of time looking for wild flowers and old trees.
IG: @SkunkBabePoet | Website: ayesharaees.com