Join Split This Rock and Kay Ulanday Barrett for a dynamic reading honoring Trans Day of Remembrance with Trans Ruckus: A Trans Non-Binary Celebration of Poetry. We're going to usher Trans poetry on our virtual stage!
Hosted and curated by Kay Ulanday Barrett, and featuring poets Chrysanthemum, Ezra Fox, Golden, Jimena Lucero, Zuggie Tate, and Cai Sherley, Trans Ruckus aims to honor Transgender and Non-Binary poetry through remembrance and celebration.
Trans poetics is a vibrant force to reclaim, to archive lineages, and to plot our futures with care and candor.
ABOUT THE HOST & CURATOR
KAY ULANDAY BARRETT is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ Napper. They are a 2024-2025 Disabled Futures Fellow awarded by The Ford Foundation and United States Artists. He is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. They have attended residences at Tin House, Millay Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, Lambda Literary, Macondo, and was a James Baldwin fellow at MacDowell. Their work has been published by The New York Times, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Vogue, Brevity, and more. Their book More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) is a Stonewall Honor Book and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.
ABOUT THE POETS
CHRYSANTHEMUM is a poet and performance artist. She serves as Co-Director of the Providence Poetry Slam and Writer-in-Residence for the Providence Commemoration Lab. She is a recipient of fellowships from Poetry Foundation, Kundiman, and Lambda Literary, which named her LGBTQ Writers in Schools’ inaugural Poet-in-Residence for the LGBTQ+ Youth Poet Laureate Residency. In 2016, she became the first trans woman finalist of the Women of the World Poetry Slam, and her teams won the Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam and the first-ever FEM Slam. With Justice Ameer, she staged ANTHEM at American Repertory Theater’s OBERON. She was born to Vietnamese parents in Oklahoma.
EZRA FOX is a Best of the Net nominee who lives and writes in San Francisco, CA, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University. A Tin House and Lambda Literary Fellow, and recipient of the Lili Elbe Memorial Scholarship for promising transgender writers, Ezra’s work appears in TriQuarterly, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. Additionally, they won the 2025 West Trade Review Poetry Prize, and was selected as a finalist for poetry prizes from Palette Poetry, Bellingham Review and Birdcoat Quarterly.
JIMENA LUCERO is a writer, actor, and cultural worker from New York City. Jimena was a 2019-2020 Emerge-Surface-Be fellow at the Poetry Project. Her writing appears in Zoeglossia, The Recluse, Entropy Magazine, Poetry Center, Center for Book Arts, and elsewhere. Her short film Silver Femme won the Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Silver Femme has screened at Outfest Fusion, Inside Out, the Museum of Modern Art, and more. Jimena’s work is rooted in trans liberation, disability justice, and future building.
ZUGGIE TATE (she/her) is a poet and spoken word artist with a BA in Sociology from Case Western Reserve University. Her work is rooted in her intersectional identity as a Black, Trans, Larger-Bodied, Poverty-Born Woman living with invisible disabilities. A fellow at Twelve Literary Arts, Assembly of the Arts, and The Watering Hole, she has also participated in workshops by Torch Literary Arts. She is also a 2025 Lambda Literary Fellow and a 2025 Literary Cleveland Amplify Fellow. Through her poetry, Zuggie seeks to celebrate, center, and affirm Black Trans Women while inviting broader audiences into empathy, re-education, and acceptance.
CAI SHERLEY (he/they) is a Black trans poet-educator with roots in Boston, MA. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, you can find his work in Best New Poets 2022, swamp pink, and Peach Mag, among others. His poetry focuses on excavating Black trans masculine histories and has been supported by The Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, Tin House, and Lambda Literary. He now serves as a Poet in Residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, is a proud member of the Crossroads Writers Collective, and is a stepdad to two sphynxes.
GOLDEN (they/them) is a Black gender-nonconforming photographer, author, & educator raised in Hampton, VA (Kikotan land). They are the author of A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (2022), a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry (2023), and Reprise (2025). Their photographic series On Learning How to Live, an Arnold Newman Prize Finalist (2021), documents Black trans life at the intersections of surviving & living in the United States.
ACCESSIBILITY
Accessibility is a core value for Split This Rock. We strive to provide programs, materials, and communications that allow people within the disability community to engage fully. On-screen ASL interpretation, Zoom auto-captions, and a document formatted for screen readers with poet bios & poem text will be provided.
Let us know of any accessibility questions or accommodation requests via the workshop registration form or by emailing [email protected] with "ACCESS REQUEST" in the subject line by Thursday, November 6th. Given our ongoing funding challenges, we cannot promise accessibility services, but will do our best to provide accommodations.
DISCOUNTED TICKETS
Split This Rock is committed to providing more affordable options for paid poetry programs. There are a limited number of $5 discounted tickets available on a first come, first served basis. If you need a discounted ticket, please email [email protected] with "Discounted Ticket Request" in the subject line. We will send you a discount code you can use for 50% off when registering. When these seats are all claimed, we will update this page.
ABOUT SPLIT THIS ROCK
Split This Rock is the only national organization with a mission to integrate poetry and social justice. We materially support poets who are often excluded and underrepresented in the literary landscape, particularly those who are BIPOC, LGBTQ, disabled or chronically ill, and/or working class. With strong commitments to racial, gender, economic, and disability justice, we work to expand the horizons of inclusion and assert the transformative power of language to bear witness to injustice and provoke social change. We believe poetry acts as an agent for change by revealing the diversity and complexity of human experience, reflecting on daily lives and struggles, considering personal and social responsibility, and envisioning a better world. Learn more at Split This Rock's website.