Jasminne Mendez is a Dominican American poet, translator, playwright and award-winning author of several books for children and adults. Her debut poetry collection, City Without Altar (Noemi Press), was a finalist for the Noemi Press poetry prize and was released in August 2022, and her debut middle grade novel in verse, Aniana del Mar Jumps In (Dial), is forthcoming in 2023. Her poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in The New England Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, and others. She is the author of Island of Dreams, Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry, A Bucket of Dirty Water: Memories of My Girlhood, and the picture book Josefina’s Habichuelas. City Without Altar (Noemi Press) is a poetry collection and play in verse that explores what it means to live, love, heal and experience violence as a Black person in the world. “Machete,” the play in verse at the center of the book, amplifies the voices and experiences of victims, survivors, and living ancestors of the 1937 Haitian Massacre along the northwest Dominican-Haitian border during the Trujillo Era. Between the scenes are interludes that explore a different kind of cutting and what it means to feel “othered” because of illness, disability, and blackness. Ultimately, City Without Altar is a meditation on being/feeling blacked out by the archive, on the world stage, and in one’s daily life.