Radical Poetry Reading with Stephen Ira

is a writer, teacher, and young professional. Kamden, a nonbinary Black settler who goes by Kam, works on issues of surveillance, race, queerness, and American politics. They’re thankful for support from The National YoungArts Foundation, The Davidson Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, among others. Kam’s writing appears in West Branch, The Black Warrior Review, Tagvverk, Denver Quarterly, The Columbia Review, and other publications. Formerly, they served as an AmeriCorps VISTA, and held Maytag, Teaching-Writing, and Pfluflaught Fellowships at the University of Iowa. Currently, they are the Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, a reader at Flypaper Lit, and an incoming board member at VIDA: Women In Literary Arts.

Novelist Jackie Ess is the author of Darryl (Clash, 2021), which is her first book, of hopefully many. That‘s the main thing you ought to know about her for now.

lives and writes in Toronto and is associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, which is located on traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory. The author of Wanting in Arabic, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1, she is a Pushcart nominated poet and has poems in recent issues of Mizna and Tripwire, and in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. She is editor of the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, and is co-editor of special issues of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on cultural production, and of Arc Poetry Magazine, featuring work by trans, Two Spirit and non-binary writers.

is a poet, playwright, and founder of the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture. His performance novel The Nancy Reagan Collection (Futurepoem 2020) made the NYPL’s Best 100 Books of 2020, LitHub’s 65 Favorite Books of the Year, and is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. Maxe is Interim Associate Director of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Stanford University.

A writer, filmmaker, and performer. His poetry has appeared, or shortly will, in venues like DIAGRAM, Poetry, Fence, American Poetry Review, and tagvverk. As an actor, he has appeared at venues like La Mama Etc, Dixon Place, and The Stud, creating roles in new plays by poets like Maxe Crandall and Bernadette Mayer. As a filmmaker, his work has appeared at OutFest, New Fest, and the Philly Trans Wellness Conference. In 2013, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow. In 2019, he completed an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is currently a poetry editor at the speculative magazine Strange Horizons.