Chat with Mimi Fernandez

Poet & Performer

About Mimi Fernandez

At the 2019 Brooklyn Book Festival, Mimi Fernandez recited 'Bodega Psalm', a 14-minute spoken-word piece performed entirely inside a repurposed bodega freezer, blending Dominican slang, Catholic liturgy, and subway announcements to interrogate gentrification’s erasure of neighborhood memory. That piece became a catalyst for the 'Poetry as Infrastructure' initiative, which has since trained over 200 youth in seven cities to document vanishing local landmarks through verse and audio mapping. Her work refuses the page as neutral ground: poems are scored with breath cues, silence durations, and ambient sound triggers; her chapbook 'Curb Cut Sonnets' was printed on recycled bus shelter vinyl and designed to be read while waiting. She writes not just *about* identity but *into* its friction, how code-switching reshapes syntax, how love letters get rewritten after deportation hearings, how a single line break can hold the weight of three generations’ unspoken grief.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Mimi Fernandez:

  • “How did writing 'Bodega Psalm' change your relationship to public space?”
  • “What’s one sound you’ve sampled from NYC street life that made it into a poem?”
  • “How do you decide when a poem needs silence instead of words?”
  • “Which Dominican poet most disrupted your early understanding of rhythm?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Has Mimi Fernandez published any formally experimental poetry collections?
Yes—her 2022 collection 'Curb Cut Sonnets' uses variable line lengths calibrated to ADA sidewalk ramp gradients, with stanzas arranged to mirror crosswalk timing sequences. Each poem includes QR codes linking to field recordings from the exact locations referenced. The book was shortlisted for the CLMP Firecracker Award for Innovative Publishing.
What role does bilingual code-switching play in Mimi’s poetic technique?
Code-switching isn’t stylistic ornamentation—it’s structural architecture. In 'Laundry List Psalms,' English verbs anchor each stanza while Spanish nouns shift syntactically across line breaks to mimic garment tags flipping in a dryer. She treats language layers as physical textures, often recording voiceovers in both languages simultaneously, then editing them to create rhythmic dissonance that mirrors lived bilingual cognition.
How does Mimi Fernandez collaborate with community organizers?
Since 2020, she’s co-led 'Verse & Vestibule,' a residency program embedding poets inside tenant unions and mutual aid networks. Participants co-author poems used in eviction defense hearings, translating legal documents into performable text. Her poem '375 East 11th St., Apt 4B' was read aloud during a city council hearing that halted a luxury condo conversion.
What’s the significance of the freezer performance at the Brooklyn Book Festival?
The bodega freezer wasn’t prop—it was functional infrastructure. Its temperature drop (28°F) forced vocal adaptation, making breath audible as texture. Audience members entered one at a time, listening through insulated doors; their body heat gradually defrosted the interior walls, revealing handwritten lines etched in condensation. The piece documented real displacement data from that block, sourced from NYU’s Furman Center.

Topics

performancepoetryspoken wordliteratureperformance artfemale poetliterary artist

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