a brief summary
Maya Kusunoki-Martin is a foot-stomping, limb-stretching poet and rapper raised on Tongva/Chumash land in an ethnoburb of Los Angeles. Trained intensively at an early age in public speaking and dramatic acting, they sought to further interrogate their responsibility as a United Statestean in rural Iowa, where they earned a B.A. in Sociology and Linguistics from Grinnell College and graduated as a Mellon Mays fellow.
They are grateful to be currently held by the land of the Aniishanaabe people and the people of Detroit, MI. They work as an early childhood educator and facilitate ritualized creative gatherings for fellow adults. They are writing a collection of techno-grief music and poetry, experimenting in "Rap Ministry" — imagining new ways of collectively gathering and grieving without religious institutions or the ingrained hierarchies that come with them. In this work, they interrogate the question: What if we wrote not only the sermons, but the sacred texts themselves?
They plan to pursue an MDiv degree from Earlham School of Religion with an emphasis on the creative act as prayer and writing as a form of ministry.