Writer's Gallery
Writer's Bio
Dahlia Aguilar is a Texas-born Chicana poet, daughter of El Paso and Corpus Christi, who has called Washington, D.C. home for more than three decades. Her writing moves through memory's rooms, where humor and ache share a cup of coffee and the ghosts of girlhood slip back in wearing her hat. Moving between tenderness and defiance, her poetry interrogates power, migration, identity, inheritance, and survival through the intimacy of lived witness, shaped by Indigenous, linguistic, and environmental consciousness.
A 2025 DC Arts and Humanities Fellow and Macondista, Aguilar has participated in writing residencies and workshops with Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico, and Elk River. Her poems appear in Naugatuck River Review, The Acentos Review, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Journal X, Entre Magazine, Paragon, among others. Her work is also anthologized in Boundless, If the Trees Were Pens, the award-winning Somos Xicanas and the forthcoming Nepantla Divina, an Chicana ekphrastic poetry collection (Riot of Roses).
Her debut poetry collection, La Otra Cara, was published in September 2026 by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women's Voices series. Her manuscript Tidal Range was a finalist for Trio House Press's 2024 Louise Bogan Poetry Award, and Por La Costa received recognition in Purple Ink Press's Beloved Chapbook Contest. She was also named a finalist for PHIL Lit's 2026 Winter Contest.
An active member of Washington, D.C.'s literary community, Aguilar has performed with Tintas DC at the Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival and as a featured reader for READ THE ROOM at Dupont Underground's Red Stage. She is a member of Tintas DC and Círculo de Poetas and Writers.
Before turning more fully toward poetry, Aguilar spent nearly three decades as an educator and school leader. She continues to work as a strategist, consultant, and writer, bringing a lifelong commitment to language, community, and the transformative possibilities of storytelling to her work.
She lives in Deanwood, beside her beloved Anacostia River, with her teenage son, two dogs, and menopause.
