updates/ current:
10/21/24:
artwork by Jen White Johnson
disabled wild ideas and big dreams, hard work paying off despite.
After four years of work, much hitting of brick walls, research, despondency, digging myself out of that and total autistic brown femme hyperdrive persistence, I am so fucking proud to announce that the Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Arts Residency is launching at Tidal River Residency in Mik’maki, “Nova Scotia” in May 2025. T.S. Banks and Cyree Jarelle Johnson are our initial two residents.
SPMLAR is a writing residency by and for disabled/ sick/ ND/ Deaf QTBIPOC writers. An experiment, not an institution. An honoring of my loved one’s work as a poet and writer. Legacy. The fulfillment of a promise I made to my comrade, friend and chosen sib, disability justice writer, movement worker and friend Stacey Park Milbern, the morning I found out she had died on May 19, 2020 before she could finish her book.
Her book might not be able to be in the world, but honoring her life and legacy can mean living room made for other disabled/sick/ neuroweird/Deaf QTBIPOC writers to be able to just fucking write and get our books in the world. And to just be.
I am so thankful for the slow steady work and allllll the kinds of support that made this project happen. Thank you to everyone who filled out the survey I made about “what do you want in a SDQTBIPOC writers residency?” two years ago, the individual donors and Borealis Foundation’s Disabled Joy grant for giving me some money, Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network for the fiscal sponsorship that makes the work possible, Elizabeth Sweeney of Tidal River for making an accessible residency space on a river that leads to the ocean and gifting it to us, everyone who told me to keep going. You can read more about the project here on the Living Altars webpage (which, keep an eye, there are more projects afoot soon to be announced.) I also wrote about the process of making it happen over the past four years in this August post.
Long live the disabled wild idea. Long live disabled Asian brother love after death. Long live all our books, all our weirdness.
Other news:
Crips for e Sims for Gaza hit a million USD last week.
We continue to raise money (we need about 30k a month to top up/ keep running existing eSims that have been activated and are being used by all kinds of Gazans, and we raise more to give for new e Sims) at our Chuffed fundraiser link here.
We also got got a shout out on Mercedes Eng’s Cop City Swagger, on pages 102-103 where Eng writes a long list of what care is and includes Crips for e Sims on it.
Me, Meg Day, Cynthia Mannick and Danez Smtih read at Dodge Poetry Festival’s online “the body; a praise song” reading here, with ASL. Dodge Poetry Fest is a very cool non shmancy non academic poetry festival in Newark, happening this weekend (but you can watch us reading and talking about bodies and poetry anytime at the link.)
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Un1oPbTQkC8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Kelly Hayes interviewed me and Elliot Fukui about being Mad people in this time, the current conditions for Madness in the world right now, and keeping each other alive, for her Movement Memos podcast (transcript above, embedded audio below)
https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/5SLacDQGCB7lgMZL4p7ptD?utm_source=generator
6/6/24
I’ll be cohosting at this legendary best shit ever space with Cyree Jarelle Johnson. summer solstice 2024
I have two pieces in foglifter’s current issue, cop it here
6/3 I read at the Harvard Bookstore launch of Alice Wong’s Disability Intimacy anthology.
5/4 spoke at Portland State’s Walk of the Heroines (great speech, vid up shortly)
a bunch of other stuff- more soon.
4/19/24
some places you can catch me in public april 2024:
April 10: Temple/Tyler College of Art Critical Dialogue, in conversation with Zoe Zahava Steinberg 5:30- 7 PM
April 14: Lifewerq! workshop #1 as part of Life, Death and Disability with Power and Choice Spring Series: End of Life Planning For the End of the World, 4-5:30 PM PST
April 17: UW Bothell 2-4 pm PST
April 28: Lifewerq workshop #2, End of Life Planning/ Power of Attorney document co-work jam
April 29: El Tailler OutStanding Life writing workshop for queer and trans elders in Massachusetts (online)
April 30 Disability Intimacy reading online launch event Harvard Bookshop, 6 PM, with Alice Wong, Ellen Samuels and Nicole Lee Schroeder.
3/9/24
I’m reading poems at Pandemic Solidarity for the Long Future ‘s convening tonight (3/9/24). reg is closed butttt check out their statements and their important formation as a Black lead multiracial group doing COVID conscious work.
read at In Water and Light’s series of readings for a free Palestine 2/24.
I keep writing cute new work on my Substack and you should give it a read and a follow.
Crips for eSims for Gaza keeeeeeps one rolling and we hit 253k US???? How is this possible? We’ve purchased and sent 3423 eSims and 937 are activated. Jane Shi and their crew are endlessly working on doing the work of buying and sharing eSims. Please note that there are a variety of issues with eSims being activated, including that people are trying to activate them necessarily from rooftops during active IOF bombing so sometimes why they aren’t activated is people die trying. eSims are why the Flour Massacre news got out, they are crucial. If you helped, thank you for helping. If you can, keep boosting, donating and sharing. We’re going to be at month six soon and it fucking sucks but our solidarity has to be as steadfast as Palestinian survival.
My Patreon continues to be fire and have new poetry.
Watch this space for upcoming readings and speaks at community spots and colleges, and new writing news.
Free Palestine, Sudan, Illankai, Tigray, Turtle Island, Duwamish territories, Philly, all of it.
1/29/24
Crips for E Sims for Gaza took the fuck off. We somehow have collectively raised $122 CAD/ $90.42 USD as of 1/25/24. We have enough to buy 2000 e Sims. You can read the interview Kelly Hayes of Movement Memos did with Jane, Alice and me about the project here. Please keep donating and boosting the project– Gaza just came out of a two week cut off of all WiFi and the only way for people to connect with the world was through eSims. This is a good Twitter thread Jane did answering common questions people have about eSims and troubleshooting issues (“why did mine not turn on yet” etc.)
Watch this space for news of a webinar Jane and me are planning to explain about how to use eSims and how to help the project.
1/5/24 I’m so happy to have a filthy tender piece, one of many, about the use of fantasy and solo sex in my life as well as a meditation on longing in the lives of my (disabled) mother and me, in Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care and Desire, edited by Alice Wong You can pre-order it here.
I also have a piece in the forthcoming Mad Scholars anthology with a lot of other Crazy people. edited by Melanie Jones and Shayda Kafai. “I’m Too Crazy for a Job: Thoroughbreds, fuckups and autistic, Mad, disabled femme grassroots intellectual freedom portals.”
Jane Shi, Alice Wong and I organized the Crips for eSims for Gaza project, which at latest count (1/2/24) has raised 60K Canadian, sent 309 eSims so far and 45 are active.
12/4/23: i took a year off to give grief a long minute. much of what I did in 2022-2023 was private and unseen. however, some things still got made that you can witness and touch. here they are:
recent writing and performance:
“Feeding the Revolution: Crip love, mutual aid, and pots of immune-boosting soup on the stoop.” Eater, as part of Alice Wong’s Low and Slow disabled food series.
second edition The Future Is Disabled, with new afterword and “Against the Great Forgetting” essay.
unghosted: A Virtual Reading Room Celebrating Asian Diasporic Trans, Nonbinary & Gender-Expansive Writers November 11, 2023. This event, organized in the wake of the 2023 Asian American Literary Festival’s cancellation, was be held virtually on Zoom, featuring Andrea Abi-Karam, Ashna Ali, H Felix Chau Bradley, Celeste Chan, 최 Lindsay, Chae(lee) Dalton, River 瑩瑩 Dandelion, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, Zeyn Joukhadar, Koomah, e.jin, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Trish Salah, Willy Wilkinson. Curated by Ching-In Chen, Noah Arhm Choi, Chrysanthemum, and Yanyi. In collaboration with Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, Brew & Forge, The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS), Kaya Press, Kundiman, Lambda Literary, Loyalty Books, and Palah Light Lab at The New School.
home is a holy place: Asian/ Pacific Islander Organizing for Survival and Love. Lecture, Smith College, November 9, 2023
18 Million Rising “did you eat yet?” newsletter takeover for disabled liberation month.
I wanna be with you everywhere summer solstice gathering. Performance Space NY, June 21, 2023. disabled ancestor grief portal altar. altar/ installation, with artwork by Jen White Johnson, Derek Dizon and Claudia Leung.
odes to the lost/never lost: poetic suite of disabled memory, remembering our beloved dead.
where do we go from here? a roundtable from some disability justice organizers in this the only moment in time. Disability Visibility Project, May 2023. With Tasha Fierce, Aimi Hamraie, Sami Schalk, Bri Joy Yakshini-Moore
In defense of autistic trans self-detirmination. co-authored by Cyree Jarelle John and me.
a long winter crip survival guide for pandemic year 4/forever. by me and tina “contant tt” zavitsanos. jan-feb 2023, 2.0 version launched nov 2023. compilation of tips and hacks for safer hangs outside in cold winters by/for disabled people enraged from being pushed out of public life.
new poems, “When your friend dies like Jesus on her 33rd birthday and “I want to kill the medical industrial complex for you.” Massachusetts Review: Disability Justice. winter 2022.Volume 63,Issue 4
Wired. Kinetic Light. Full length poetic audio description suite for this “passionate and potent aerial and contemporary dance experience that tells race, gender, and disability stories of barbed wire in the United States. The dancers of Kinetic Light trace the fine line between “us” and “them” as they explore the contradictions, dangers, and beauty of barbed wire. Immense and intimate, Wired meditates in sound, light, and movement as it questions and ruminates on power, belonging, abolition and deinstitutionalization, sexuality, art, community, and connection—all through the powerful lens of disability as creative and cultural force.” 2022-present, various venues including Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Lincoln Center NY, online.