Join us on Thursday June 22 for a celebratory reading for PRIDE on our virtual stage! This year we are featuring our co-presenter Kay Ulanday Barrett, Chrysanthemum Tran, Diamond Forde, and Ryka Aoki!

RSVP HERE!

KAY ULANDAY BARRETT is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, a winner of the 2022 Next Book Residency with Tin House, and a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They have featured at The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, The Hemispheric Institute, Symphony Space, The Ford Foundation, Brooklyn Museum, Princeton, Columbia University, Yale, Manchester PRIDE, Sesame Street, & more. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Colorlines, Literary Hub, The Advocate, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, The Lily, and elsewhere. For more info: kaybarrett.net

CHRYSANTHEMUM TRAN is a Vietnamese American poet, writer & performance artist. She’s the recipient of a MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation & an Artist Residency at Williams College. A finalist of the Women of the World Poetry Slam representing her home venue at the Providence Poetry Slam, Chrysanthemum produced & wrote ANTHEM at the American Repertory Theater’s OBERON. Profiled by PBS & WBUR, her writing appears in The Nation, Them, Bettering American Poetry, The Offing, among others. Her work confronts the historical inconsistencies rooted in the clinical & legal vestiges of empire. Outside of poetry, she moonlights as a queer health researcher & community historian.

DIAMOND FORDE’S debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including a Pink Poetry Prize, a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award fromClaremont Graduate University. A Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow, Forde’s work has appeared in Poetry, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. In her spare time, Forde also serves as the interviews editor of Honey Literary and the fiction editor of Nat. Brut.

RYKA AOKI (she/her) is a poet, composer, teacher, and novelist. Her latest novel, Light From Uncommon Stars, was an Alex, SCKA, and Otherwise Award winner, and was also a finalist for the Hugo, Locus, and Ignyte Awards.Ryka is a two-time Lambda Literary Award finalist for her collections Seasonal Velocities, and Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul, and her first novel, He Mele a Hilo, was called one of the “10 Best Books Set in Hawaii” by Bookriot. She has been recognized by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people,” and her work has appeared or been recognized in publications including Vogue, Elle, Bustle, Autostraddle, PopSugar, and Buzzfeed, as well as the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. She was also honored to work with the American Association of Hiroshima Nagasaki A-Bomb Survivors, where two of her compositions were adopted as the organization’s “songs of peace.”

//ACCESSIBILITY//

This event will be streamed on Zoom Webinar. Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link via email in advance of the event. The event will be uploaded to the AAWW YouTube channel at a future date. 

This event will be captioned and ASL interpretation is provided by Pro Bono ASL. For other access needs, please contact tle@aaww.org.

EVENT IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ID: Atop a peach glitter background are abstract curved shapes in chartreuse and hot fuchia with a hot orange curved line adorning the chartreuse shape. There is bold black text that reads “CELEBRATING PRIDE, A READING WITH KAY ULANDAY BARRETT, CHRYSANTHEMUM TRAN, DIAMOND FORDE, AND RYKA AOKI,” four QTBIPOC writers. From left to right: Kay Ulanday Barrett, is a trans poet with coifed black hair and large clear framed glasses. They are looking into the distance with a pensive look. They have a hoop lip ring in the center of their bottom lip and hey are wearing an open, wide collared, button down shirt with an abstract black and white print. Chrysanthemum Tran is a trans Vietnamese poet with golden skin. She has blonde highlighted wavy hair parted in the middle. She is looking directly into the camera with her mouth slightly open. She is wearing dark lipstick, a chain close to her neck and black mesh shirt. Diamond Forde is a Black femme poet with a short curly fade. She is wearing large square plastic framed glasses and is slightly smiling into the camera. She is wearing long dangly earrings with red tassles. Ryka Aoki is a trans Japanese interdisciplinary artist and writer with long black hair and straight bangs. She is looking away from the camera and has her right hand on her cheek. Slightly smaller black bold text reads “JUNE 22, 7PM ET. ONLINE. ASL PROVIDED. RSVP AT AAWW.ORG/EVENTS. At the bottom of the graphic is a white bar with black bold text with an italicized AAWW logo and text that reads “Asian American Writers’ Workshop.”