Alyshia Gonzalez: Poet & Author

Diamond Holly
Jul 31, 2023
9 min read

Updated: Aug 13, 2023

August 13th, 2023

Alyshia Tuyet Gonzalez is a Mexican-Vietnamese NYC-based poet from Los Angeles. Alyshia is a first-generation college graduate with her B.A. in Ethnicity, Race, and First Nations and her M.A. in Sociology. Her expertise lies in critical race theory, abolitionist societal formation, and diversion advocacy, focusing on reducing the suspension, expulsion, and arrest of Black and brown students and ending the U.S. drug war. Alyshia believes in the power of principled struggle and ensures that a racial and transformative justice lens informs all of her work.

While never formally trained in poetry, she's been writing since she was 12 years old. She began her performance poetry career at ASU, where she won first place at the annual poetry slam. Since then, she has been invited to perform at Ray of Hope Walk LA and been a guest teaching artist for Compton School District and Broadway for Arts Education serving students in South Central LA & the South Bronx. Alyshia is a proud alumni of the Spoken Lit LA Poetry Intensive. Her work has been featured in the SJSA Voices of Change Gallery Guide, and she recently published her first chapbook on love titled " & Also With You"

Can you share a bit about yourself as an author, writer, and poet? What inspired you to pursue these creative paths?

Sure, My name is Alyshia Tuyet Gonzalez. I’m a poet from LA that currently lives in NYC and I’ve been writing since I was 12 years old. I know it sounds cliche but I truly believe that the creative path chooses you when you’re young and you spend most of your adult life fighting to get back to that inner knowing of your childhood. The knowing that you’re meant to create something only you can create and I feel like that’s what has inspired me all these years. The tickle in the back of my brain, the itch in my throat that said there is more to this life and I have something to say and I am going to say it no matter what life tries to take from me. Don’t get me wrong though, the path was not and still isn’t always clear. A lot of times I think, “what the fuck am I doing? This isn’t going to pay the bills.” but then the sun shines a particular way or I spend time with the moon and the wheels start turning and the poem starts spilling out of me and I think, something that comes this natural to me should be shared with the world because it’s important to be enthralled with life and capture that in words.

As a writer and poet, what themes or topics do you find yourself most drawn to in exploring your work?

I’d say my favorite topics come in four distinct buckets: love, family, religion, and critiquing America. Funny enough, at some point or another they all seem to overlap and all the themes can spill out of one poem. I believe all art is political, and all art is a story told from a particular lens at a particular time. Documenting these topics, these emotions, these questions that come up in my writing is archival work, it’s historical. As much as my poems are true to the moment I am experiencing them, I also think an inextricable link in my work is what do I want future generations to know? What do I want my grandchildren to feel like they have permission to question because their grandma did? What do I not want erased from history? And the answers always seem to be: I want them to know love, that their family was here and existed, that God is meant to be questioned, and that the American dream is a lie. It is our duty to not lose our traditions and storytelling is traditional. I want them to use the stories to guide their own creation of the new world, because the world will end many times, and begin again, and they will bear witness and be a part of that.

Are there any particular authors or poets who have influenced your writing style?

Wow, I could list so many Toni Morrison, Warsan Shire, Rudy Francisco, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, but most of all James Baldwin, which is wild as I’m writing this on what would have been his 99th birthday. I’ve read about half of all of Baldwin’s collected writings and he continuously fascinates me. The way he conveys his life experience and that of his family. How his community is reflected in the stories he chose to tell. How he is a very “matter of fact” writer while still being deeply inquisitive. His poem “The Giver (For Berdis)” is one of my favorite poems of all time. It punched me in the gut as a self-identified giver and made me reflect on the inherent virtue placed on the giver while demonizing the taker. When he laid it out as both clamoring for the same love, the same approval, the same mirrored desire it truly knocked the wind out of me and I thought “this is how profound I’d like to be.” Baldwin also says that “a sentence should be as clean as a bone” and I think about that when I write, does the poem feel clean? Is it still impactful after trimming the excess fat?

What are some of your favorite pieces that you've written, and what do they mean to you?

Some of my favorite poems are unreleased poems to be honest. I feel like I’m saving my best work for my next project (which is in the works!) From the poems I released, I think my top 2 are:

“Sundae Kind of Love”: It’s a love poem on the surface but there’s so much bubbling under it. One day it was a too hot Sunday and I was laying in my bed staring at the ceiling fan and I thought, “What are all the things that make up a Sunday?” And I started to write them down. I started with the labor movement, which is the reason we even have weekends, that’s the reference to chainmill hands, and then I thought about ice cream sundaes and how I’d love one in this heat. I thought about church on Sundays being a marker for me and I thought about how being in bed with your lover on a Sunday is one of the sweetest moments life has to offer us. I wanted to honor all of those Sundays and capture desire at the same time and I felt like I did just that. This poem is in my chapbook.

My second favorite has to be “Nickle and Dime Me” it’s the only poem I’ve ever written about my dad, and it might stay that way, as the only one. It was the first time I experimented with prose, and it is probably the storytelling I’m most proud of. I think it captures the complexity of humans, how we are always more than one thing and the deep sorrow of what had to happen to someone to make them someone you no longer wish to know. This poem is not formally published but you can find it somewhere on my instagram.

How do you balance your creative endeavors with other aspects of your life such as family, friends, and work?

I don’t sleep much to be honest! Especially when I was writing this book and putting it all together for publishing but honestly? The integration is easy because the creativity is part of me at all times. My friends and family are also creative so they get it. I can be chilling watching a movie with my friend and if a poem strikes then, they understand why I whip out my notes app. My work is social justice related so if anything it gives me more ammo about why I believe America is a wretched place and I’ll write a line between meetings at work. I’ve even been lucky enough to be commissioned by orgs I’ve worked for to write poetry for them or teach a class. I feel like any artist worth their weight has found a way to plant pieces of their art self in all aspects of their life. It’s the only way we survive.

Have you ever faced writer's block, and if so, How do you navigate through it?

Literally all the time and I’ve just recently started to see it as a normal thing and not a bad thing, because I am a human and I am not an endless pit of creativity and I do not owe anyone overproduction, and producing large quantities of art does not mean I’m producing good art. During the pandemic, I didn’t write a poem for almost a year and I literally thought something was wrong with me and I wasn’t a real poet and all the skill and work I put in didn’t mean anything because I wasn’t writing now so what was the point? The only thing that helped me navigate it was talking to my creative friends, writers, visual artists, recording artists, and they were all like “dude me too, it's normal” and I started to be kinder to myself about it all. I was also able to redirect the energy and realized that if I wasn't writing, I probably wasn’t experiencing a lot of life and it was time to go outside and touch grass. So yeah, my recommendation is if you’re feeling blocked go spend time with nature, people watch, and remind yourself of the questions you have about life and write down the answers without judging them.

Aside from writing, do you have any other passions or hobbies that contribute to your creativity or inspire your work?

I’ve been an organizer and in non-profit management for nearly a decade. My primary focuses are racial justice, restorative justice, and abolition. I’ve met so many incredible people from my work, I’ve traveled to different states and countries, and each time I learn something new. At the core of my artistic work is capturing the human experience and if I didn’t do this work I wouldn’t have as much access to the worlds of other people and my art would suffer because of it. I also love art myself. I think going to different exhibits, concerts, festivals, and reading also make me a better artist because I’m inspired by the creativity that exists all around me.

How do you approach the creative process? Do you have any rituals or routines that help you get in the writing process?

Writing is an experience, a full body one and it’s a release of energy also. I could name another thing that’s also like that though I’m not too sure the age of people who will be reading this so I’ll leave the entendre there. I say that sometimes a little foreplay is good, I’ll set my intentions, clear my space, light a candle, spend time with the moon before I dive into writing. Sometimes, all I need is a quickie, pen to paper real fast with a quick line out here or there. That’s what I’ll say about my process, the process is the point and it can look whatever way your heart needs in that moment. The most important thing is it should feel fun and like you released what you needed to so you can exchange that energy with the world.

What message or impact do you hope to leave on people?

While I know that representation alone will not save us, growing up as a Mexican-Vietnamese person with little to no positive representation of my people deeply affected my sense of self and belonging. Even when there was a Latinx or Asian character on screen or in books, often these stories were told by those in my community most palatable to the white gaze. Very early on I was aware of meritocracy and the bootstrap myth using my family’s stories and desire for survival as a functioning tool to uphold white supremacy and anti-Blackness. I began to wonder more about my positionality in collective liberation. How was my experience as a non-Black person of color and identity as a mixed-race person weaponized in America? How do I reclaim that? How do I lead with honesty? Knowing my people have existed for centuries before colonization and how much of that history was stolen from us, born in me a deep desire to uphold the tradition of storytelling and artistic expression to document our ways of being. I want future generations to feel proud of their cultures, to see their people being strong, powerful, and unapologetic in protecting each other. I believe it is a radical social responsibility to ensure the next generation is supported in shifting culture and policy both through art and advocacy, as they have historically informed one another. While my goal is to uplift all youth of color and gender-expansive youth, I also firmly believe that, in my version of radical social responsibility, there is a duty to help non-Black youth of color have aspirations that are not tied to white supremacy and assimilation or built off the backs of Black creativity and culture.