Curated by Tom Cole & Christen Clifford, this event features fiction, nonfiction, poetry & performance texts by the most adventurous, cross-genre established & emerging writers. Featured authors include L Scully (Nonfiction, January 2023), Patricia Spears Jones, and Heather Lynn Johnson.

L Scully is a living writer. They are, first and foremost, a lover.

Patricia Spears Jones is an African American poet, anthologist and cultural activist who received the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize and was appointed The New York State Poet (23-25). She is author of The Beloved Community and ten other collections, and two plays commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines. She edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin Inauguration Day Hat and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets. She serves on the board of The Poetry Project, is founder/of the American Poets Congress, is a Senior Fellow Emeritus for the Black Earth Institute and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Hartwick College.

Heather Lynn Johnson (she, they) is an artist and poet living in Brooklyn whose work is characterized by its lyricism and cultural critique. Heather’s formal approach to the narrative, whether visual or poetic, is distinguished by her willingness to lay bare her own existence. Centered around queer and Black American liberation and culture, with an emphasis on outsiders, rebels and lost histories, Heather uses an autobiographical framework and considers their work imbued by their lived experience as a butch Black lesbian. Heather has published poems in the Panorama Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Pique Magazine, Pine Magazine, and Facility Magazine. Heather was a co-curator for Queer|Art|Film from 2020-23, the 2019 Leslie-Lohman Museum Fellow, and the 2017 Literary Fellow for Queer|Art|Mentorship. She is also the author of “The Survival Guide For Queer Black Youth” (Inpatient Press, 2017) and received an MFA with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design.