Alejandro Heredia

Alejandro Heredia is a queer Afro-Dominican writer and community organizer born in Santo Domingo and raised in The Bronx. He is a 2018 VONA/Voices fellow and 2019 Dreamyard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium Fellow. Myriam Gurba selected Alejandro' s chapbook, You're the Only Friend I Need, as the winner of the 2019 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Contest. The book was published in summer 2021. Alejandro' s work has been featured in Auburn Avenue Magazine, La Galeria Magazine, No Dear Magazine, and elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate at Hunter College.

Community

by | March 1, 2023

In his column, Alejandro Heredia meditates on the concept and practice of community: is it a group of people who beyond identity might have no personal and interpersonal bonds, or a commodity for corporations, non-profits, egotistical activists, and social media spiritual gurus looking to make profit off of an increasingly conscious society, or is it shared visions of the future as building blocks of collective living?

African American girl and her father planting a seedling.

Perreo

by | January 19, 2023

Columnist Alejandro Herredia meditates on the democratic power of perreo.

villano antillano, la sustancia x cd cover

Tenderness

by | September 29, 2022

Tenderness teaches us that if we consider softness with enough rigor, if we consider ourselves with enough softness, a wound is a portal, not an end. 

illustration of a man touching his heart

Company

by | July 14, 2022

I faked all of my book reports as a kid – I hated reading. I got good grades in my ESL classes only because of some natural ability with words. At least that’s what teachers said. Gifted. My ease with diction and syntax had less to do with natural ability and more to do with my growing ability to adapt. I was surviving.

vintage drawing of frogs going for a walk

Opacity

by | June 10, 2022

Alejandro Herredia debuts his new Tasteful Rude column with a meditation on the word opacity.

african american woman on social media

Notes on Imagined Places: From Tim’s Creek to Santo Domingo

by | September 3, 2021

This imagined town in North Carolina, where all of Kenan’s stories take place, is home to preachers, farmers, Black and white people, the rich and poor. In this town lives a queer Black boy, Horace Cross, whose life is being shrunk by the social boundaries delimiting his desire, the same machinations of shame and disregard that turn many young Black queer people into ghosts of themselves.

a visitation of spirits