Cat De La Paz is a detribalized Indigenous trans Chicana writer in Seattle. She writes for those who are haunted by their impossible bodies.

Her short story “You Were Always Mi Mija” is forthcoming in The Louisville Review (Fall 2025).

ARTIST STATEMENT:

I don’t represent anything but possibility.

Literal, liminal.

I’m not chronicling anything. I am exploring different modes of being trans. I write every trans character as possibility—not as symbol or testimony, but as a gesture toward liberation. Each figure I create is a movement of thought, a version of myself being set free.

My work liberates my characters from identity and positions them in motion. I am interested in transition not as gender, but as a universal condition—the act of becoming as an ethical and spiritual force. I write through transness as a method: to move language, body, and being toward openness.

Real authenticity is not a fixed truth, but fidelity to movement itself.