Join Woodland Pattern Book Center for a reading and conversation focused on trans and nonbinary poetics featuring George Abraham and Chrysanthemum, and guest curated, hosted, and moderated by Ching-In Chen.
In person at Woodland Pattern and livestreaming via Crowdcast
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Presented as part of The First Function of Poetry (Is to Tell the Truth): A Social Justice Series with support from the NEA.
George Abraham (they/he) is a Palestinian American poet. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are currently executive editor for Mizna, and are a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, the Arab American National Museum, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, National Performance Network, and more. They are currently co-editing a Palestinian global anglophone poetry anthology with Noor Hindi (Haymarket Books, 2024) and are a Litowitz MFA+MA candidate at Northwestern University.
Chrysanthemum is a poet, performance artist, and public historian who serves as co-director of the Providence Poetry Slam. She is the winner of a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Kundiman Fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 Justin Chin Memorial Scholarship from Lambda Literary. Chrysanthemum first broke ground as a finalist in the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam. Her teams were champions of the Rustbelt Poetry Slam and the first-ever FEM Slam. Featured on PBS and Button Poetry, she appears on nationwide stages and in The Nation, Them, and The Offing, among others.
Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer, and teacher. They are the author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems and recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters. Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, a Massage Parlor Outreach Project core member, and a Kelsey Street Press collective member. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation, and writing project exploring breath through meditation, health, and environmental justice.