On the one hand, I’ve lived searching for a language with which to speak truth to loss, on the other, I have learned to work the word to build communities under the banner of the literary arts and engagement. I volunteered for several years editing and publishing writers of the margins of visibility and support in the literary sphere to national acclaim and have developed and participated in countless cultural programs and events in the city in the past decade. My earlier activism focused on naming dominant biases in literary editorial practices. I am running so that the most vulnerable among us have a representative of the disposition to demand loudly for the poet is a mouthpiece of people. I seek to gut corruption in Albany; we need politicians of moral clarity who will champion our immediate needs and prioritize preparing our district and our people for a radically-changing city and planet.
Joey De Jesus is a lifelong New Yorker. They are a poet, artist, editor, and adjunct lecturer running for New York State Assembly District 38 because state representatives should demonstrate thoughtful, ethical leadership; politicians should champion the vulnerable, not the prerogative of the wealthy in a district seeing rapid gentrification and displacement.
Joey De Jesus is the author of HOAX (Operating System, 2020), NOCT- The Threshold of Madness (The Atlas Review, 2019), and co-author, alongside Sade LaNay, of Writing Voice into the Archive vol. 1, edited by Jennifer Tamayo with support from UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender. Joey received the 2019-20 BRIC ArtFP Project Room Commission and 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Poetry. Poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Artists Space, Barrow Street, Bettering American Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Magazine, The New Museum, The Newtown Literary Review, Southern Humanities Review, Symmetries: An Anthology of the Dominique Levy Gallery, and elsewhere. They’ve performed in Art Omi, Basilica Soundscape, The Nuyorican, The Poetry Project and elsewhere. Joey is an editor at Apogee Journal, a literary non-profit committed to uplifting the voices of writers at the peripheries of literary inclusion and sits on the advisory board of No, Dear Magazine. Joey holds a MA in Performance Studies from New York University, where they studied as departmental fellow, a MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Oberlin College. Joey lives in Ridgewood. Photo Credit Dan Gutt & RAGGA NYC
Joey De Jesus for NY AD38 