Ellen Kombiyil
Ellen Kombiyil (she/her) is a visual artist, poet, and educator from the Bronx. She is the author of two books and two chapbooks, most recently Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024). She is a 2022 and 2025 recipient of a BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, a 2025 winner of the Geri Digiorno Multi-Genre Prize, and 2025 winner of the Tupelo Quarterly Prize for Cross-Disciplinary Writing. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College. Find her at www.ellenkombiyil.com.
THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INSANITY’S DIAGNOSTIC
ON THE PLUMBING & WIRING OF FEMALES
Winner: Anhinga Visual Poetry Series Award
Pre-Order - Winner of the Anhinga Visual Poetry Series Award
THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INSANITY’S DIAGNOSTIC ON THE PLUMBING & WIRING OF FEMALES
Ellen Kombiyil’s Plumbing and Wiring is a breathtaking and electric exercise in revisionism. Each page of erasure offers depth, texture, and story to an otherwise controversial publication, forcing the reader to look through its occluded windows, to see the “wayward and capricious” women who populate the centuries of metatext. Kombiyil does not just elude genre; she makes image and text sing, wordlessly, to and with each other. • grace (ge) gilbert
Ellen Kombiyil’s revisionist erasure Diagnostic on the Plumbing & Wiring of Females is a brilliant, uncanny work of collage and poetics. Wielding a weird and breathtaking beauty, Kombiyil upends the absurdity used to dehumanize women. In these erasures, the subversive power of imagination affirms that play and color are not superfluous, but antidotes to fear and institutional violence. Even as we mourn the nameless women subject to this “diagnostic,” Kombiyil resurrects them with a mesmerizing radiance that reclaims feminine power. • Jessica Cuello
