Come celebrate Queer Liberation with Mouth to Mouth, hosted and curated by Kay Ulanday Barrett and Jimena Lucero! This month we’re featuring powerhouse writers Ariana Brown, aureleo sans, Kirin Khan, and Michal “MJ” Jones. Come celebrate their work with us!

RSVP HERE to receive a link the day of the event!

**Mouth to Mouth seeks to provide a safe community space for queer and trans BIPOC folx and and rising migrant artists.**

// NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY//
This event will be captioned and ASL Interpretation is provided by our friends at Pro Bono ASL.

KAY ULANDAY BARRETT (@brownroundboi) is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist; their collection More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Book Honor Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Barrett has been featured at Lincoln Center, the United Nations, Symphony Space, the Poetry Foundation, Princeton University, the Hemispheric Institute, and the Brooklyn Museum. They’ve received fellowships from MacDowell, Lambda Literary Review, Macondo, and VONA. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Asian American Literary Review, them., NYLON, Vogue, Buzzfeed, The Advocate, Frontier Poetry, The Rumpus, RaceForward, and more. Currently, they remix their mama’s recipes in Jersey City with their jowly dog. www.kaybarrett.net.

JIMENA LUCERO is a poet, actor, & cultural worker. Her short film Silver Femme screened at the 59th Ann Arbor Film festival, Outfest Fusion, Inside Out, and NewFest Film Festival. She was a 2019-2020 Emerge-Surface-Be fellow at the Poetry Project. Her writing appears in Zoeglossia, The Recluse, Nightboat’s Echo, and more. Jimena’s work is rooted in trans liberation, disability justice, and future building.

ARIANA BROWN is a queer Black Mexican American poet from San Antonio, TX, currently based in Houston. She is the author of We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021) and Sana Sana (Game Over Books, 2020). Ariana’s work investigates queer Black personhood in Mexican American spaces, Black relationality and girlhood, loneliness, and care. She holds a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies, an M.F.A. in Poetry, and is pursuing an M.L.S. in Library Science. Ariana is a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion and owes much of her practice to Black performance communities led by Black women poets from the South. She has been writing, performing, and teaching poetry for over ten years. Follow Ariana online @ArianaThePoet.

aureleo sans is a Colombian-American, non-binary, queer, formerly unhoused writer with a disability who resides in San Antonio, Texas. This year, she is a Tin House Scholar, a Sewanee Writers Conference Scholar, a Roots Wounds Words Writers Retreat fellow. a Lambda Literary fellow, an ASF Workshop Fellow, and a Periplus fellow. She was named the second-place winner of Fractured Lit’s 2021 Micro Fiction Contest and has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction. Her work has been published in The Offing, Shenandoah, and Electric Literature and is forthcoming in Passages North, Salamander, No Tokens, and elsewhere. 

KIRIN KHAN is a Pashtun-American writer living in Amsterdam. She’s received fellowships from PEN America’s Emerging Voices, SF Writers Grotto, AWP’s Writer to Writer program, and San Jose State University’s Steinbeck program, and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and Tin House. Her essay “Tight” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was listed on Entropy’s Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in Corporeal Khora, Nat Brut, Foglifter and elsewhere. She’s also an editor for the Triple Threads section of queer fashion lit mag Just Femme & Dandy, and encourages you to send her your best fashion hot takes.  Find her on Twitter or Instagram @kirinjaan or read her work at kirinkhan.com.

MICHAL ‘MJ’ JONES is a poet & parent in Richmond, CA. MJ serves as the Editor-In-Chief of Foglifter Press, a premier journal publishing trans and queer writers. They received their MFA in Creative Writing – Poetry from Mills College. They founded & currently facilitate Litany!, a monthly workshop for a cohort of Black queer poets. Their debut poetry collection HOOD VACATIONS is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2023. http://michal-jones.com