I identify myself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. My care is to work towards a praxis of technological, artistic, and pedagogical hybridity and how partial beings, one influenced by disembodied dislocation and its allocated loss, can find belonging and safety in third space spatiality.
I place poetry at the center of my creative and research practice. Across painting, film, video, animation, sound, experimental theater, design, performance, and new innovations in technology and media, I aim to challenge conventional ideas of linear language, form, and binary perceptions. My practice is shaped by query. What is the interrelated relationship between belonging and dislocation? Divinity and spirituality? And the dialectical relationship between beauty and cruelty? Through the accumulation, repetition, and recontextualization of collective archives and personal narratives, especially of the marginalia, I investigate the image as a site of historical transmission and political contestation. Informed by Asian poetics, postcolonial theory, and experimental literary traditions, my work attends to the afterlives of colonialism, the violences of erasure, and the unstable conditions through which identities and histories are represented. My practice advances a commitment to decolonial, anti-violence, and anti-erasure methodologies, treating poetry as a means of contesting dominant regimes of representation while making space for beauty.
Poetry is both medium and a method. I explore how prosodic structures, visual motifs, and non-linear forms of language have the potential to generate meaning beyond conventional texts. My video poetry and hybrid visual works bring literary composition into dialogue with animation, archival footage, painting, sound, and installation. My inquiry increasingly extends into creative technology, with an interest in creative coding, image mapping, generative systems, and immersive media. Technology is not a neutral instrument. Hence, I approach it as a potential site of both beauty and cruelty. It is a site for poetic experimentation: a medium of investigating how spatial environments might endorse a new facet for experiencing language.
I am an Assistant Professor at CUNY. Education is one of my highest values and teaching one of my inherent passions. My pedagogical practice is rooted in query and critical reflection. Writing is a process through which students examine the relationship between their lived experiences and social structures that shape them. Drawing on Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, my pedagogy emphasizes inquiry before statements where feedback as a dialogic practice rather than a unilateral judgment. I have taught poetry courses through this lens. Some being: "Build Me A Third Place For Exist: The Video Poem" and "Poetry of Collaboration: Radical Togetherness in a Time of Crisis."
Beyond the classroom, I have contributed to literary and cultural communities through my editorial work at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, where I have served as a Poetry Editor from 2019 to 2026. I was the founder of Habib Poetry Festival in Karachi as well as of One Minute Press, a small press celebrating micro literature and art through zines from Asian/Asian American identities.
I am from Pakistan: from Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Mianwali, Bahawalpur.
I live in the USA as a working writer and artist: New York City, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Bennington.
Always around and not around: ayeraees@gmail.com