Artists Dismantling Borders: A Night of Resistance
Jess X Chen, Kayla Briet, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Sonia Guiñansaca, Giselle Buchanan, & Sabrina Ghaus
Artists Dismantling Borders: A Night of Resistance

CALLING ALL ARTISTS! A desire to deconstruct and resist is a plus. Amidst the chaos come on home and take the time to ground yourself in poetry and music– for and by our people. This is a night to rejoice, to celebrate radical imagination, and to heal. We’re joining together to resist borders and these new executive orders. Hosted by Sonia Guinansaca, featuring poetry and music by Brown, Black, Trans, Native, and Disabled artists of color : Kayla Briet, Jess X Snow, Giselle Buchanan, Sabrina Ghaus, and Kay Ulanday Barrett.

RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Sonia Guiñansaca is a Queer Migrant Feminist Poet , Cultural Organizer, and Activist from Harlem by way of Ecuador. In 2007, Guiñansaca came out publicly as an undocumented immigrant. Since then she has co-founded and help build some of the largest undocumented organizations in the country, coordinating and participating in groundbreaking civil disobedience actions in the immigrant rights movement. She is a VONA/Voices alumni who has performed at El Museo Del Barrio, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, NY Poetry Festival, Galleria de La Raza, and featured on NBC, PBS, Latina Magazine, Pen American, and the Poetry Foundation to name a few. Praised as badass in 1 of 10 Up and Coming Latinx Poets You Need to Know by Remezcla, as well as one of 13 Coolest Queers on the Internet by Teen Vogue. Guiñansaca was recently announced as the 2017’s Artist in Residency at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

Kayla Briët is a 20 year old Native American self-taught filmmaker, composer, and musician. Her short films have taken her to the White House for the 2014 First-Ever White House Film Festival. As a multi-instrumentalist and self-taught composer, Briët scores her own films and creates music in styles ranging from cinematic to alt. pop and electronic. You can catch her performing live on stage as a one-woman band, armed with a keyboard, guitar, guzheng zither, and loop pedal as she creates evocative music with personal, empowering, and resonant lyrics. Can’t wait for the show? Tune in to Kayla’s Soundcloud for a taste.

Giselle Buchanan is a poet, multidisciplinary artist and writer from the Bronx, NY. Despite the use of many mediums, her work is united under the umbrella of healing. She believes beauty is restorative and that art can act as a therapeutic agent. As an artist deeply involved in her community, she has worked extensively with women, incarcerated men on Rikers Island and children in East Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.

Sabrina Ghaus is a Pakistani-American Muslim storyteller, writer, and organizer based in Brooklyn, and the proud daughter of immigrants with roots in Boston, Ohio, the Bay Area, and Karachi. She’s been published in The Riding Light Review, Jaggery, and is the author of a zine open wounds, seeded heart. She works with the National Network of Abortion Funds, fighting for abortion access for all people and in her downtime you can find her fiercely loving her cat- and plant-babies, baking pie, and frolicking in the outdoors.

Jess X. Snow is a queer filmmaker, multi-disciplinary artist/activist and nationally-touring poet. Her work exposes narratives of colonial trauma, diasporic love and collective protest. Through film, mural-making, poetry and education, she is working toward a future where migrant and indigenous youth of color see themselves whole and heroic, on the big screen and the city walls & then grow up to create their own. Her first full-length book of poems, Sing Me A Time Machine, is forthcoming. You can read Jess’ What I Saw Through The Telescope on The Margins here.

Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, and educator, navigating life as a disabled pilipinx amerikan transgender queer in the U.S. with struggle, resistance, and laughter. When The Chant Comes (Topside Heliotrope 2016) is their first collection. K. has been invited to The White House, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, The Lincoln Center, Queens Museum, and The Chicago Historical Society to name a few. They are a fellow of both The Home School and Drunken Boat. Their contributions are found in PBS News Hour, Lambda Literary, RaceForward, Foglifter, The Deaf Poets Society, Poor Magazine, Fusion.net, Trans Bodies/Trans Selves, Winter Tangerine, Make/Shift, Third Woman Press, The Advocate, and Bitch Magazine. You can read their interview with PBS on poetry as a testimony to survival here.

NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tracy Wong at twong [at] aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.

Artists Dismantling Borders: A Night of Resistance

Jess X Chen, Kayla Briet, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Sonia Guiñansaca, Giselle Buchanan, & Sabrina Ghaus
Monday, February 27, 2017
7:00 PM
$0.00
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th St., 6th Flr
New York NY 10001
Upcoming Events
April 4 7:00 PM
[IN-PERSON] CRYSTAL HANA KIM: THE STONE HOME W/ JULIA PHILLIPS
Presented by AAWW and Books Are Magic, join us to celebrate Crystal Hana Kim's The Stone Home, a hauntingly poetic family drama and coming-of-age story that reveals a dark corner of South Korean history through the eyes of a small community living in a reformatory center—a stunning work of great emotional power from the critically acclaimed author of If You Leave Me.
April 30 6:30 PM
[IN-PERSON] SEJAL SHAH PRESENTS HOW TO MAKE YOUR MOTHER CRY, WITH MINNA PROCTOR
Join McNally Jackson and AAWW to celebrate Sejal Shah's HOW TO MAKE YOUR MOTHER CRY, a collection of genre-queer short stories braided with images and ephemera explore the experiences of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman searching for home. Sejal will be in conversation with writer, translator, and editor Minna Proctor!
May 2 7:00 PM
AAWW & Kundiman Present: Emerging Writers in Conversation
Join AAWW and Kundiman in-person and online for a conversation between emerging writers Hannah Bae, Jen Lue, Gina Chung, and Rajat Singh!