A reading and discussion on poetry as a liberatory practice, with trans Asian poets Kay Ulanday Barrett, huiying b. chan, and Nora Hikari at the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival on October 23, 2022.
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a Trans Filipinx disabled poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell, and a 2022 Tin House Next Book Residency recipient. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Yahoo News, The Lily, The Huffington Post, Massachusetts Review, Poetry Magazine, them., Colorlines, Al Jazeera, The Advocate, NYLON, Vogue, and The Rumpus, to name a few. Currently, they remix their mama’s recipes and live in Jersey City with their jowly dog.
huiying b. chan is a visionary poet, healing practitioner, cultural organizer, and educator born and raised on Lenape Land (Brooklyn, NY). huiying’s poetry, organizing, and facilitation work lives at the intersections of personal and societal transformation. huiying has received fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, VONA/ Voices, and DreamYard. his work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and is published in Best New Poets 2021, The Offing, The Margins, The Shade Journal, and the Asian American Journal of Psychology. huiying is working on his first book that explores matriarchal legacies, self-remembrance, and unwritten queer and trans lineages. He recently won the AWP Kurt Brown Prize for his title poem. He believes in love and liberation.
Nora Hikari is a bisexual Asian American transgender poet and artist based in Philadelphia. Her work has been selected by such publications as Ploughshares, Washington Square Review, Foglifter, The Journal, Gulf Coast, Palette Poetry, and others.
Hikari is the author of three chapbooks: DEAD NAMES, GIRL 2.0, and her newest chapbook, Let’s Burst Like Stars, which is forthcoming in 2024 at swallow::tale press. She was a finalist for the 2021 Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, and is a 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow.
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