Heartbreak. It's unavoidable. An expectation shattered. A sudden turn. A gradual reckoning. Whether over a person, an opportunity, or a dream, we've all been haunted by longing and loss. Come join 4 kick-ass local womxn writers and non-binary writers as they explore the bruised, blushed terrain of their heart's desire.
Featured Artists
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer, disability and transformative justice movement worker, and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. The Lambda Award winning author of Tonguebreaker, Bridge of Flowers, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap, Love Cake and Consensual Genocide, with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, she co-edited The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies From the Transformative Justice Movement, co-edited with Ejeris Dixon, is forthcoming from AK Press in spring 2020. Since 2009, she has been a lead artist with the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid.
The co-founder of QTPOC performance collective Mangos With Chili and Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School, they are a VONA Fellow and hold an MFA from Mills College. She is also a rust belt poet, a Sri Lankan with a white mom, a femme over 40, a grassroots intellectual, a survivor who is hard to kill.
Keetje Kuipers’ third collection, All Its Charms, was published by BOA Editions in 2019. Her poems have appeared widely, including in The New York Times Magazine, as well as the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Previously a Wallace Stegner fellow, Bread Loaf fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, Kuipers is currently Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest.
Anne Liu Kellor is a multiracial Chinese American writer, teacher, editor, and coach. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Longreads, The New England Review, The Normal School, Fourth Genre, Vela Magazine, and Literary Mama, and her manuscript, HEART RADICAL, was selected by Cheryl Strayed as 1st runner-up in Kore Press’s 2018 memoir contest. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, 4Culture, and Jack Straw.
Jessica Mooney is a former Hugo House fellow whose writing has appeared in Entropy, Moss, City Arts Magazine, Salon, the Rumpus and elsewhere. Her chapbook Parting Gifts for Losing Contestants, a collection of essays, is forthcoming from COAST|noCOAST in October. She is grateful to have received grant awards from Artist Trust, the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and 4 Culture.
