F239.
Chosen Family: Making Kinship Among Queer Poets
Friday, February 9, 2024
3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
In the queer community where chosen family can be a vital lifeline, mentorship and influence go beyond craft and career to show us not only how to write but also how to live and love more fully. In this way, queer poethood can resemble a kind of parenthood where artistic lineage becomes a true kinship. This panel will dig into our own queer family trees and the ways that mapping those creative and cultural lineages has helped us to inhabit our bodies and poems freely and with a shared joy.
Participants
Keetje Kuipers’s third collection of poems, All Its Charms, includes work honored by publication in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. A judge of the 2022 National Book Award in poetry, she is currently editor of Poetry Northwest and a board member at the National Book Critics Circle.
Meg Day is the 2015–2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level. Day is an assistant professor of English and creative writing in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University.
Jan-Henry Gray (he/him) is the author of Documents, chosen by D.A. Powell as the winner of BOA Editions' Poulin Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Selected Emails from speCt! Books. An Undocupoets and Kundiman fellow, he is an assistant professor at Adelphi University in New York.
Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Thom Gunn Awards for Gay Poetry. He has received the Cave Canem, Fulbright/IIE, NEA, and Stegner fellowships, among others. He teaches poetry at Northwestern University.
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry and longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award. She lives in San Francisco.
