Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid art through hybrid forms. Her work strongly revolves around issues of race and identity, G/god and displacement, and mental illness while possessing a strong agency for accessibility, community, and change. Raees cultivates relationships between the word and the image through theatrical performance, filmic visual imagery, paint, and documentary photography. 

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Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at AAWW's The Margins and has received fellowships from Asian American Writers' Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. Her work has been endorsed by Millay Colony for the Arts, University of Findlay, Bennington College, Newburgh Community Photo Project, and elsewhere. 

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Raees's first book of poetry, "Coining The Wishing Tower" won the Broken River Prize hosted by Platypus Press and judged by Kaveh Akbar, and will be forthcoming in March 2022. Akbar describes her book as:

 “everything I hope to find when I read a book of poetry—fearless reckoning with unprecedented experience spoken in a singular, deeply and importantly strange lyric voice.”

 

Raees's VideoPoem "The Memoir.... " was the winner of the Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest hosted by SlipperyElm at the University of Findlay and has been  selected for national and international film festivals including the Midwest Video Poetry Fest & 9th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens, Greece.

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Raees is a graduate of Bennington College with a degree in Film & Animation, and Poetry & Playwriting, Raees was born in Lahore, Pakistan and currently resides in New York City and Miami.

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