Event Archives
Still Here, Still Queer: Writing Workshop with the Segerstrom Community for the Arts
In the summer of 2020, I was hired by the Segerstrom Community for the Arts to run an oral histories workshop called Still Here, Still Queer. I wanted to help participants to tell and collect oral histories as a way to archive intergenerational and LGBTQ POC experiences in Orange County. However, I pivoted from an oral histories workshop to a generative writing workshop because of all the grief and trauma that came up for all participants as a result of the pandemic and ongoing state violence.
quaranTIME: bust a rhyme (a poetry workhop)
On April 29, 2020, I facilitated a poetry writing workshop with Ah-ri and Viet Rainbow of Orange County.
Queer Becoming of Age: A Ritual and Reading
On September 26, 2019, I read a ritual and short nonfiction queer coming of age story as part of Lambda LitFest.
To come out and to come of age—both are queer rituals that forever alter the ways we move through life. In this event, we propose that queer coming out/coming of age does not have one fixed origin story. Sometimes we come out (or in to ourselves) over and over again. This ritual of “becoming” queer follows us from youth to adulthood and is full of unexpected twists and turns. Readers will perform work that explore the many ways in which we become queer, which are at times humorous and traumatic, silly and profound, and everything in between. Part reading and part ritual, each writer will read original work followed by an offering of an imagined or past object to mark one passage of queer becoming in their lives. Let this reading and ritual mark one of many passages of our queer becoming!
** Please bring an object or offering for our altar. You may collect your object/offering after the reading is done. **
Please refrain from wearing fragrance to the event out of consideration for those with scent sensitivities.
Featuring...
Addie Tsai teaches courses in literature, creative writing, dance, and humanities at Houston Community College. She collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. Addie holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. Her young adult novel Dear Twin is forthcoming from Metonymy Press this November. Her writing has been published in Banango Street, The Offing, The Collagist, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut., and elsewhere. She is the Nonfiction Editor at The Grief Diaries, Senior Associate Editor in Poetry at The Flexible Persona, and Senior Editor of Culture and Interviews at Raising Mothers.
Maya Beck is a Cali transplant, lapsed Muslim, covert otaku, part-time hermit, broke blipster, and socially-anxious social justice bard. She is also a 2019 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grantee, 2019 Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Next Step Fund Grantee, as well as an alum of writing fellowships and programs by VONA, Kimbilio, Tin House, We Need Diverse Books, The Loft Literary Center, and the Givens Foundation. Her Pushcart-nominated writing has been published in LitHub, Mizna, PANK, Pollen Midwest, NAT BRUT, Catapult, Water~Stone Review, and more. She's recently enrolled in a data analytic coding bootcamp, and would love to talk diversifying tech with you.
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night (Atria/Simon & Schuster 2020), a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and a member of American Mensa. His work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review Daily, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Map of Salt and Stars, currently being translated into sixteen languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.
T.K. Lê writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She has shared her work on KPCC’s Take Two and on stage for ALOUD-Los Angeles and Tuesday Night Project. Her essay, “Part of Memory is Forgetting,” appears in the W.W. Norton anthology, Inheriting the War. She is an alum of the VONA/Voices summer writing workshop and is currently a PEN America Emerging Voices fellow.
She strongly believes that her writing cannot exist without community. She tweets @tk_le_tired.KAY ULANDAY BARRETT aka @brownroundboi is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. K. has featured at The U.N., The Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Princeton University, Tucson Poetry Festival, NY Poetry Festival, The Poetry Project, The Dodge Poetry Foundation, The Hemispheric Institute, & Brooklyn Museum to name a few. They are a 2x Pushcart Prize nominee and received fellowships from Lambda Literary Review, VONA/Voices, The Home School, Pink Door, and Macondo. They've previously served as Guest Faculty for The Poetry Foundation & Crescendo Literary, as well as Guest Editor for Nat.Brut. Their contributions are found in Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, Asian American Literary Review, PBS News Hour, Poets House, F(r)iction, VIDA Review, NYLON, The Huffington Post, Them., & Bitch Magazine. Their first book, When The Chant Comes was published by Topside Press in 2016. Their second collection More Than Organs, will be published by Sibling Rivalry Press, Spring 2020. For more info see: Kaybarrett.net
The Bricks Reading Series
On February 28, 2019, I read an excerpt of a short story as a part of the University of Notre Dame’s Bricks Reading series. I shared work alongside the brilliant Sheree Renée Thomas and Maya Beck.
Queer Joy Spoken: Queer Poets of Color Revel
On May 30, 2018, I shared poetry with three other amazing queer poets at Avenue 50 in Los Angeles, as part of the Lambda LitFest.
Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling,
once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply,
can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of
our lives produce that kind of joy.
-Audre Lorde#QPOC
For queer people of color, the past two years have not revealed anything new. Once again, we are reminded that those in power are not there to protect us. We are asked to put our suffering on display but only for gazing, or worse still, to further marginalize others. As socially-conscious queer poets of color, we rebel and reject narratives that limit us. We recognize that wellness is integral to resistance, and we choose to celebrate with expressions of bliss, elation, and pleasure. Our ability to articulate joy is imperative to our survival and continued sustenance. We invite you to explore what gives you joy and participate in the revelry.
Join JUBI ARRIOLA-HEADLEY, T.K. LE, MURIEL LEUNG, and IRENE SUICO SORIANO for an afternoon of #QPOCjoy. Our poetry may touch on the familiar (a child’s laughter), the sublime (stalks of sugarcane towering over an unstable household), the knotty (being both daughter and anti-filial), and even the sentimental (cuddling a dog at the end of the day). Welcoming goodness comes easiest when we radiate our full selves.
Sunday, September 30. 2018
3:30 PM
Free Event
RSVP: http://bit.ly/QueerPOCJoy
Venue Sponsor
AVENUE 50 STUDIO
131 North Avenue 50
Highland Park, CA 90042
READERS:
JUBI ARRIOLA-HEADLEY
Jubi Arriola-Headley is a poet and storyteller, a first-generation American born to Bajan (Barbadian) parents. He’s a VONA/Voices and Lambda Literary alum, as well as a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. Jubi is currently working on his first collection of poems, tentatively titled Original Kink, which in which he aims, as a black man, a gay man, a target, to navigate the space between rage and joy. Jubi and his husband divide their time between South Florida and Guatemala, where he hopes to pick up enough Spanish to figure out what his in-laws are saying about him. (You can learn more @ www.justjubi.com.)
T.K. LE
T.K. Le’s fiction and poetry imagine a future in which patriarchy dies and people of color deserve and proliferate joy. She has shared her work on KPCC’s Take Two and on stage for ALOUD-Los Angeles and Tuesday Night Project. Her essay, “Part of Memory is Forgetting,” appears in the W.W. Norton anthology, Inheriting the War. She is an alum of the VONA/Voices summer writing workshop.
MURIEL LEUNG
Muriel Leung is the author of Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She is a contributing editor to the Bettering American Poetry Anthology and is also poetry co-editor of Apogee Journal. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Southern California. She is from Queens, NY. She tweets (@murmurshewrote).
IRENE SUICO SORIANO
rene Suico Soriano is an immigrant FilipinX American poet, independent literary curator and the author of Primates from an Archipelago (Rabbit Fool Press, 2017). She was the Festival of Philippine Arts & Culture’s long-time literary curator and founded and coordinated the Southern California reading series “Wrestling Tigers: Asian Pacific American Writers Speak” at the Japanese American National Museum. She was featured in the Los Angeles Times for her curatorial participation in the groundbreaking NEA funded “World Beyond Poetry Festival” that featured over 100+ poets from the diverse communities of Los Angeles. She received the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship in 2001 and her poems have appeared in, among others, The Philippines Free Press, Solidarity Journal, Disorient, Clamour dyke zine, the Maganda Eleben queer issue and Highway’s Traffic Report. She participates in local and international anti-vivisection efforts and believes in the fundamental rights of non-human animals to live their lives, free from harm, pain, exploitation and captivity. (Find her on Instagram: @ArchipelagoPoem)