Anaïs Deal-Márquez is an artist and multi-genre writer whose work explores home, belonging, and memory. Her poetry collection about diaspora, migration, and grief was a 2024 finalist for the Diode Editions Book Contest and the Rising Writer Prize at Autumn House Press, as well as a semi-finalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and the Dorset Prize. Her writing has been published in POETRY, The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Yellow Medicine Review, The Acentos Review, Pleiades, Huizache, and elsewhere. She is also a classically trained violinist and cellist currently studying the Son Huasteco tradition of her home state of Veracruz.

Anaïs has performed at venues such as The Dakota Jazz Club,The Loft Literary Center, Pangea World Theater, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and Macalester College. In 2010 she performed her one woman show, Octubre, about the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, under the mentorship of actor Roger Guenveur Smith. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Literary Center, VONA/Voices, and Tofte Lake Center. 

With 15 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, Anaïs’s professional background spans community organizing, public policy, social justice training and facilitation, narrative strategy, and executive leadership.

She holds a B.A. in American Studies and International Studies with a minor in History from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.