Rebelené is the chosen moniker of Zelene Suchilt, Winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award from the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago and recipient of the Rooftop Film Fund/DCTV grant. Her filmmaking practice explores femininity, humor, and the memory of fruit as tools to deconstruct the failures of ancestral and colonial patriarchies.Her debut poetry collection, Music for Butterflies/Música para mariposas (Editorial Ultramarina, Spain 2022; re-issue on Rebelené Press NYC 2023) was cataloged in the American Section of the National Library of Italy in Naples and the National Library of El Salvador, San Salvador. An accompanying musical concept-album, Music for Butterflies, was released in 2022. She is the founder of the Aztlántique Literary Arts Festival.
She is an alumni of the MACONDO Writers Workshop in 2023 for fiction under the tutelage of Sandra Cisneros and Ruth Behar, and VONA / Voices Writers Workshop in 2014 for political content with Elmaz Abinader. Her writing residencies include Doña Helen’s 2015 in Fresno, California, Comadres Writers Master Class The New School 2016, and Kettle Pond Writer’s Conference 2019 and 2025 at Paul Smith College New York.
In 2005, at the age of 16, she founded the annual poetry festival The Word Around Town Poetry Tour based in Houston, Texas, which ran for 10 years. She participated in the 2012 Librotraficante Caravan against the banning of Chicano literature as “librotraficante Rebelené.” She is a human rights worker and has contributed professionally to organizations and movements that work towards immigrant dignity, Black power, press freedom, indigenous sovereignty, environmental and reproductive justice.
Rebelené 