Jasminne Mendez
Jasminne Mendez is a best-selling Dominican-American poet, educator, translator, playwright and award winning author of several books for children and adults. She has had poetry and essays published in numerous journals and anthologies and she is the author of two multi-genre collections including Island of Dreams (Floricanto Press, 2013) which won an International Latino Book Award. Her debut poetry collection City Without Altar won the 2022 Texas Institute of Letters best book of poetry award and her debut middle grade novel in verse Aniana del Mar Jumps In (Dial) was released in March 2023 to four starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews and others. Her debut picture book Josefina’s Habichuelas (Arte Publico Press, 2021) was the Writer’s League of Texas Children’s Book Discovery Prize Winner and her second YA memoir Islands Apart: Becoming Dominican American was released this past fall. She has translated the work of NYT Best Selling authors Amanda Gorman and Calribel Ortega and the Houston Grand Opera.
She is an MFA graduate of the creative writing program at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and a University of Houston alumni. She is the Program Director for the literary arts non-profit Tintero Projects and teaches creative writing for Goddard College. She lives and works in Houston, TX.
Selected Publications
POETRY: “Machete: Look,” Split This Rock: The Quarry
POETRY: “To El Hombre Dominicano Who Told Me It Was Not My Place to Write about Dominican/Haitian Relations,” The Kenyon Review
ESSAY/PROSE: "The Burden of Teachable Moments," The Rumpus
WORKS:
Aniana del Mar Jumps in
Dial Books, 2023
City Without Altar
Noemi Press, 2022
2022 Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry
Josefina’s Habichuelas/ Las habichuelas de Josefina
Arte Publico Press, 2021
Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)E: Personal Essays and Poetry
Arte Publico Press, 2018
Islands Apart: Becoming Dominican American
Pinata Books, 2022
2022 Finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Jean Flynn Award for Best Young Adult Book
Island of Dreams
Floricanto Press, 2013
Translations:
Algo, Algún Día
Viking Books for Young Readers, 2023
El Proyecto 1619: Nacieron Sobre El Agua
Kokila, 2023
Rizos / Frizzy
First Second, 2023
La Canción del Cambio / Change Sings
Penguin Random House, 2022
Topics addressed in readings:
1937 Haitian Massacre
Dominican culture, food, music
Limb loss
Maternal Fetal Death and Miscarriage
Infertility
Docu Poetics
Novels in verse
Plays in verse
Hybrid works
Memoir/Creative Non-Fiction
Identity
Race
Chronic Illness/Disability
Intersectionality
Motherhood
Afro-Latinidad
Bilingualism
Black in the South
Anti-Blackness
Anti-Haitianism
Sample workshop 1: Re-Fashioning the Archive: Collective Memory & Documentary Poetics
In this generative writing workshop and discussion session we will explore how collective memory, archival documents, historical research, and personal lived experiences inform and shape the work of authors such as Natasha Tretheway, Claudia Rankine, Patricia Smith, Muriel Rukeyser, and others. We will also consider how our own personal histories, and access (or lack thereof) to historical and ancestral and archival documents and stories can shape our own writing and work. We will also spend some time crafting new work based on historical documents in the form of found or black out poems
sample workshop 2: From Unique to Universal: Making Your Personal Narratives Resonate With Readers
Stepping outside of your story and connecting it to larger universal themes is one of the most difficult aspects of writing personal narratives. And if you have a unique story that you can’t find on the shelf, it can be even harder to figure out how to make sure readers will resonate with your work. In this class, we will look at examples of authors who have unique stories and how they turned those individual and unique experiences into stories with a universal appeal. We will engage in creative writing prompts that will help tease out the universal themes in our work while not losing sight of the individual lived experiences that make each of us unique.
sample workshop 3: The Hybrid Essay: What It Is & How To Do It
Are you interested in writing that disrupts and challenges genres and forms? Are you a writer who also loves visual art and wants to include art work in a piece of writing? Whether you’re a prose writer or a poet, a beginner or an experienced writer, this class is sure to introduce you to innovative and creative ways to express yourself in writing and beyond. We will study examples of hybrid works, engage in thoughtful discussion about what makes a hybrid work successful, and we’ll do a few short writing prompts and exercises to begin crafting our own hybrid pieces of writing. Participants are encouraged to bring a work in progress they’d like to revise or “disrupt” but new work will also be created during the workshop.
testimonials
“Jasminne Mendez refocuses, re-electrifies and finally defines [documentary poetics] with this strikingly inventive exploration of how trauma scissors through borders, numbs families, feeds on the purple specter of violence and relentlessly forages for root in the body. City Without Altar is a dazzling melange of script, prose, stanza and image. Its brash and bellowing heart is a dramatization of the callous 1937 Haitian massacre, with heart-rending resurrection of both sufferers and survivors, but the poet is relentless with her magic as she unearths deep-buried parallels to her own “unblackening” and the way grief takes hold of her hands.”
“In both her essays and lyric poems, Méndez illustrates through personal experience the haunting consequences of a divide between spirit and body. She gestures toward the necessity of resilience for people of color. And perhaps most important to the book’s development, Méndez simultaneously performs and subverts labeling, questioning its influence on identity—an investigation particularly important to ‘an Afro-Latina Dominican raised in the Deep South.’”
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AVAILABLE FOR CONSULTATIONS:
During Summer (May - August) - Not available to review adult fiction manuscripts or pages
Chapbook Manuscript
Individual Poems/Pages
MFA Applications
1:1 Reading Lists and Discussion
Please contact us through Jasminne’s website or our inquiry form