Becoming Hybrid offers an intimate exploration of creative process and hybrid poetics. Weaving together essays, interviews, personal narrative, and pedagogical reflections, this book explores what it means to be “hybrid” in the twenty-first century, as artists increasingly produce work that challenges traditional formal boundaries. The book examines the transdisciplinary practice of artists like Cecilia Vicuña, Don Mee Choi, and Claudia Rankine, many of whom write from diasporic experience or from identities historically pushed to the margins. Emerging from Barizo’s lifelong engagements with music, philosophy, art, and literature, the book illuminates the idiosyncratic pathways she has taken to unsettle disciplinary boundaries as an author, artist, and performer. Becoming Hybrid traces how disciplinary and genre-bound conventions have shifted and dissolved across time, offering tools for decolonial pedagogy and collaborative writing workshops that honor multiple voices, lived experiences, and cultural traditions. Accessible yet intellectually rigorous, the book opens up a conversation about hybridity and creativity, making it an essential guide for anyone interested in how contemporary art and literature are reshaping the ways we think, write, and create today.

J. Mae Barizo is Assistant Professor of Writing and Chair of Undergraduate Creative Writing at The New School. She is the author of two books of poetry: Tender Machines (2023) and The Cumulus Effect (2015).