Alís Morris Soto lives where she was born in a California valley of beauty and trespass. Her writing career began in the third grade addressing poems to God, thus joining a long lineage of poets speaking to the divine. Her travels to Oaxaca birthed a novella, Feo, a dream-like meditation on seduction, infidelity and awakening. For three years she studied art on an island in the Aegean Sea, painting during the day and staying up late at night under the soft arch of the Milky Way. In her writing and art there is wit, joy, pain, humor, introspection, examination, appreciation, honesty and an uncanny ability to point out what we haven’t seen. She pursues the sacred and the mysterious. She authors bilingual plays and performs them in alleyways and universities. She makes art pieces repurposing fabric and stitching plastic bags together. She draws trees in notebooks with their anima manifest on the page. She is skilled in a dance born of African slaves and first performed more than a century ago in border-town brothels and bars. When I last saw Alís, she was riding a bike along a path lined with oak trees holding a small, fragile, three-legged dog close to her heart.
