Poet
Jenni(f)fer Tamayo (JT) is a poet, performer and organizer whose works reimagine the narratives about and politics of undocumented figures in the contemporary U.S. In their books, performances, and digital media, the “illegal” immigrant is recast as a punk figure that queers the norms of personhood and citizenship. They are the author of the visual art & poetry collections [Red Missed Aches] (Switchback Books), YOU DA ONE (Noemi Books), to kill the future in the present (Green Lantern Press) and the performance series, QUEERADOR@. Their most recent book, bruise/bruise/break - a journey into creative autonomy and pleasure - explores the colonial legacies of U.S. poetics, migrant futurity, the power of kinship and belonging. Their writing is widely published and has been anthologized in Best American Experimental Poetry, New Latin@ Writing, and HarperCollins. JT has received fellowships from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Hemispheric Institute’s EmergeNYC, CantoMundo, and the University of California Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. They have staged performances at The Brooklyn Museum, BAMPFA, Midtown Arts & Theatre Center Houston, and La Mama Theatre. They are a formerly undocumented, uninvited visitor born on Muisca territory (Bogota, Colombia) and are currently building a home/skool on Sapponi territory (Piedmont region of North Carolina).
Poet
Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar and media artist. Her debut poetry collection Love, Robot was published in 2017 and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association. Her new media art projects include "The Kimchi Poetry Machine" exhibited at the Electronic Literature Collection Volume III, "From. the Center" a digital storytelling project in collaboration with incarcerated women, and in progress project "Afro-Asian Poetic Pantry of Solidarities: A Future" as a Bandung Residency Project with MoCADA and A4 in NYC. Her forthcoming books include The Watermelon Women from McGil University Press Queer Film Classics Series, poetry and lyrical non fiction book Poetry Machines: Letters to Future Readers and monograph Machine Dreams: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body both forthcoming from Duke University Press. She earned her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic studies and new media studies, and her BA in creative writing and English from USC. She is an assistant professor at The New School in the School of Media Studies, and teaches in the Creative Writing MFA. At The New School, she directs the Palah Light Lab, a collaboratory for queer feminist poetics and media gestures and community.
Poet
Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer writer. He is the author most recently of Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish), Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton (Chax). Chapbooks include: What started / this mess (above/ground press); Our Weather Our Sea (Belladonna Chaplet #209); Madame Curie’s Notebook (with Maureen Seaton, Artefakta); Triple # 11: The Road to the Multiverse; and Triple #18: A minor history / of secret knowledge (with Maureen Seaton, Ravenna Press). Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, as well as a repeat finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in The Texas Review, ex-Puritan, Poetry, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry; Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, Baest, and many other journals and anthologies. Forthcoming are Portals, co-authored with Maureen Seaton (Ravenna Press), and a book-length essay, I Want to Start by Saying from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.