Mic Check! Are you a writer? Come share your work at our next edition of our open mic, Mouth to Mouth. Curated and hosted by the magical Kay Ulanday Barrett and Jimena Lucero! This month we’re featuring kiki nicole and Tivali Thomas.
Mouth to Mouth seeks to provide a safe community space for queer and trans BIPOC folx and and rising migrant artists. We seek to uplift these voices and ask all allies to step back & show your support by attending & cheering our performers on.
**To sign up for the open mic, please e-mail tle@aaww.org. Performers will be selected randomly shortly before the event.
// NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY//
This event will be captioned with ASL Interpretation by 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.
kiki nicole is an agender poet and artist who works to archive Very Black Feelings. Their work has been published in The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Shade Journal, beestung mag, TWANG Anthology, and more. kiki is the co-founder of the new media/film archival project and screening series, the first and the last, specializing in uplifting work by Black trans and queer new media artists often overlooked in traditional art spaces. In 2021, they served as the Citizen Literary Fellow at Graywolf Press. kiki is currently a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine and a member of North Carolina-based art collectives, Goodyear Arts and Saltwater Sojourn. They live in Charlotte, NC. www.kikinicole.com
TIVALI THOMAS is a NYC based, Black Transgender performance artist, community organizer, and internationally recognized spoken word poet whose work lives at the intersection of contemporary queer mores and the black experience. Since coming to New York Tivali has created an independent print and clothing studio in a pursuit to make publishing and creative resources more accessible to the local queer community. The organization, OBJECT DEFY, was created with the intention of encouraging and working with and through black trans and non conforming artists. Tivali is currently devoting most of her time to creative outreach projects within Bushwick, Brooklyn. You can find her on all socials at @T4Tivali and her company at @object.defy. For more information and to order Tivali’s chapbook, please visit objectdefy.bigcartel.com.
