Zoe Dorado PO ’27 sometimes adds “scheming” to her calendar.
“Because that’s what one does,” she said to me. “They scheme.”
At one particular scheme last semester, Dorado and her friend, Annika Weber PO ’27, hosted a “fermentation party” at the Pomona College Farm, complete with homemade sourdough, kombucha and a pickling workshop. To prepare, Dorado spent a month growing a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) by the heater in her room.
“I love it when I can find other people who are very motivated in very specific ways to create these silly projects, that at the end of the day, are about creating community,” Dorado told me.
Dorado, an English and politics major — as well as poet, drummer and abolitionist — from the East Bay, has dedicated much of her time at Pomona to these oddly specific endeavors. In her sophomore year, Dorado and her roommate Kai Chen’s PO ’26 high-ceilinged, church-like Clark III dorm room became the venue for two “Catholic Guilt” themed parties.
For “Volume One: Original Sin,” Dorado and Chen turned the bottom of their bunkbed into a confessional booth. For “Volume Two: Resurrections,” held on Good Friday, the dress code was “medieval or cunty, or both.”
They had guests LARP (live action role-play) the Passion of Christ, projected images of stained glass across the room (at Dorado’s dad’s suggestion) and plastered the walls with “WANTED: Jesus Christ” posters featuring pictures of Hozier, Keanu Reeves and the like.
Dorado also stacked 20 Bibles around the room, which she had borrowed from Honnold Mudd Library. To seem less suspicious, she did so in intervals, slipping five into her tote bag each day.
“It’s fun to invest in a project that you’re just doing because it’s interesting and fun,” Dorado said. “I can’t put ‘Catholic Guilt’ on LinkedIn.”
You could spend a long time talking to Dorado before finding out about her more LinkedIn-appropriate achievements, like how she was the runner-up for the 2024 U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate, or that she’s a poetry editor for the Adroit Journal.
But once you know, it adds up; I couldn’t help but notice that she chooses her words like a writer.
“There’s something wonderful — no, not wonderful, striking,” she said to me at some point.
Or, when explaining her thought process of inviting people: “Who will dance? No, not dance –– who will get down?” She treats her conversations with as much care as she would a poem.
For Dorado, though, the poetry scene isn’t free from critique. In her freshman fall, she started investigating the Teen Writing Industrial Complex, which she gave the shorthand “TWIC.”
“Survivors of TWIC know what it is when they hear it,” Dorado said.
“TWIC” diagnoses the institutional prestige and unequal access that underwrite the competitive culture of teen writing. For her project, along with Mulan Pan PO ’27, Dorado mapped connections between various youth writing magazines, competitions, programs and organizations, and where they get their funding.
“I study English because I want to keep loving things,” Dorado told me, while her other major, politics, often “makes [her] sad.”
Her research in TWIC prompted her to put the “politics part of [her] brain with the English part of [her] brain.” She said that it’s important for her to “remain suspicious” of the things that bring her joy, like the poetry world.
“I’ve gotten to a point where I’m okay with ambivalence,” Dorado said. “I’m not trying to reach a sort of cathartic moment of ‘Aha! This is how I feel about the writing world!’”
This idea of ambivalence played a role in a research project she did this summer, where she compared Asian American spoken word poetry with Asian American stand-up.
“I was really interested in the idea of poetic closure versus a punchline, and how often there’s this pressure to end on a neat, cathartic moment of realization or triumph, especially when the speaker is a woman or person of color,” Dorado described.
“There’s this pressure to end on ‘Yes, I have done it! I have crushed racism with my bare hands!’” she continued.
Contrary to this expectation, Dorado doesn’t think that resolution should be the aim of life or art; there is value in remaining in what she called “weird rooms of ambivalence.”
When I asked Dorado what that even meant, she said she liked the concept of “bell hooks eating Greek yogurt.”
She recalled the ending of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “House of Fame,” which she, like JaQ Lai PO ’26 and I, read for a class last semester. Chaucer’s poem, often considered unfinished, ends with the speaker seeing “a man of great authority” who never gets to speak. Dorado was struck by how the reader is abandoned in a “hovering place of uncertainty.” Even if we try to escape uncertainty, she explained, we’ll just find ourselves “in a different world of uncertainties.”
Dorado’s artistry isn’t limited to poetry. She’s also a longtime drummer, and has taught for Filipinx Girls Rock Camp and played for Call Ur Mom, a jazz-adjacent band at the 5Cs. Though she’s used to spoken word performance, she thinks music allows for something different.
“My favorite thing is when you can actively feel yourself learning from other musicians,” she told me. When “jamming out,” people are “sharing something simultaneously.”
Recently, her band-mate DJ Posillico PO ’27 invited her to try out another medium: short film. A conversation between the two about the “indie man epidemic” turned into a full-fledged production with Dorado as director.
The film, which features the guitar-playing, women’s-literature-reading, tote-bag-wearing type of male character we’ve all grown familiar with, culminates in a party scene modeled after Dorado’s fermentation party.
Not just a fermentation party, though; she decided the scene should be a “feminist fermentation” party. When I asked Dorado what that even meant, she said she liked the concept of “bell hooks eating Greek yogurt.”
This film was Dorado’s entry into directing, and she was happy that “a little seed idea” was actually brought to fruition.
“That’s why I love poetry, music, loving and throwing oddly specific parties,” she said. “You’re just making things possible with other people.”