“See Fires Now”: Against Genocidal Poetics: A Rail Reading curated by Kamelya Omayma Youssef

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. His books include I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), and Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at The New School and Columbia University, amongst others. Duplan is the recipient of numerous awards, and founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One.

Daniel Maté is a composer, lyricist, and playwright for musical theatre based in New York. He has been active since 2007, when he graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing. He also holds a BA in Psychology and Philosophy from McGill. Daniel received the prestigious Edward Kleban Prize for Most Promising Lyricist in American Musical Theatre, a Jonathan Larson Foundation Grant, and the ASCAP Foundation’s Cole Porter Award for Excellence in Music and Lyrics (for his song cycle The Longing and the Short of It.) He has presented his work at the historic Kennedy Center in Washington, DC and New York’s Lincoln Center, and was an invited participant in the inaugural Johnny Mercer Writers Colony.

Writer and poet Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. He studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. Sigo is the author of Royals (Wave Books, 2017), Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), and Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010). Of his work, Ron Silliman writes, “Cedar Sigo is a Frank O’Hara for the 21st century: witty, erudite, serious, with a terrific ear and eye for the minutest details, at home in the world of the arts.” He has taught at St. Mary’s College and Naropa University. He lives in Lofall, Washington.

Queer Palestinian-American performance artist, Fargo Tbakhi’s writing can be found in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, The Shallow Ends, Mizna, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. His performance work has been programmed at OUTsider Fest, INTER-SECTION Solo Fest, the National Queer Arts Festival, and has received support from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.

Sudanese/Eritrean poet Mohammed Zenia is working through the mediums of text, visual symbols, and sound to explore issues of language and the ever-changing meaning of words, identity and place, gender, sexuality and love, through a black diasporic lens. The author of the chapbook Barroom Seance published by Rockwell Press in 2013, and An Astrex is a Mixtape published by Rly Srys Lit in 2018. Along with video artist Jonathan Rafeal, Mohammed is the co-founder and editor of Nada: the Dadaist Magazine About Nothing. As well as the author of book Tel Aviv, released on Porosity Press April 2020. Mohammed was born in Sofia Bulgaria in 1988, and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Kamelya Omayma Youssef is a writer from Dearborn, Michigan, with roots in Jibbayn and Shmistar, Lebanon. With an MA in English from Wayne State University and an MFA in Poetry from New York University, she currently teaches poetry at the City College of New York, edits poetry manuscripts, and co-facilitates Habibi Futurism, a generative workshop for collective futurist imaginings.