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Born in Santo Domingo and raised in the Bronx, Alejandro Heredia is a poet and writer who seeks to expand the landscape of Dominican literature in the U.S. with stories about queerness, blackness, and transnationalism. The CUNY DSI Research Fellowship will enable Heredia to conduct research on queer Dominicans at the CUNY DSI Library and Archives for two creative writing projects currently underway. The first is You’re the Only Friend I Need, a novel that follows two queer Dominican immigrants as they navigate belonging and rejection in New York City and in the Dominican Republic; the second is Railway/Spine, a collection of personal and critical essays that recount the author’s own familial history of migration, going back 5 generations that includes his  great-great-grandfather, an India-born Scottish engineer. Railway/Spine also contains stories of historical significance such as Frederick Douglass’s 1871 voyage to the Dominican Republic in support of annexation by the United States. Heredia is a 2018 VONA/Voices Fellow and 2019 Dreamyard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium Fellow. In 2019, he was named winner of the Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Contest. Currently, Heredia is pursuing a Master’s of Fine Arts at Hunter College.