Queer Directions is an annual symposium at The Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies addressing ideas and pressing issues in queer, trans, and sexuality studies, politics, and culture. This year’s symposium has the theme “Trans and Queer Poetics,” inspired by Billy Ray Belcourt’s beautiful talk at last year’s 2024 symposium, Queer and Trans Reflections, when he said “a beautiful sentence can be a reason to live” and then went on to share his own beautiful sentences with us from his project “The Cruising Utopia Sonnets.” We decided to follow Belcourt’s prompt by dedicating this year’s event to queer and trans poetics and assembled a panel of poets and scholars to read their work and offer reflections on its significance to them for queer, trans, black, brown, and indigenous lifeworlds. We will be joined by Cameron Awkward-Rich, Mejdulene Shomali, Danez Smith, and Jaya Jacobo.
Speaker Bios
Cameron Awkward-Rich (he/him) is associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst. He is the author of The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction and received a Duke UP Scholars of Color First Book award, and of two collections of poetry, Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019), which received the press’s Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. His creative writing has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song: A Library of America Anthology, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and the Lannan Foundation.
Mejdulene Bernard Shomali (she/her) is a queer Palestinian poet and associate professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Williams College. She received an MA in Women’s Studies from the Ohio State University and a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan. Her research and creative writing occur at the intersection of transnational feminist thought, queer of color critique, and Arab and diasporic Arab cultural production. Mejdulene was a fellow in the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and the Cornell Society for the Humanities. She is the author of Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke University Press 2023) which won the 2024 Association for Middle East Women’s Studies book award honorable mention. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook agriculture of grief: prayers for my father’s dementia (Finishing Line Press 2024). Her current research concerns affect and embodiment in Palestinian resistance.
Danez Smith (they/them) is a poet, writer, and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of the poetry collections [insert] Boy (2014), Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), Homie (2020), and Bluff (2024).They have won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critic Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Their poetry and prose has been featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, Best American Poetry, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. They are a member of the Dark Noise Collective and the recipient of multiple fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Arts.
Jaya Jocobo (she/her) is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at Coventry University, where she works on trans feminist pedagogies in literature, art, and performance. She has worked alongside travesti and transsexual women artists, academics, and community workers in Brazil, as well as with trans, queer, and nonbinary Filipina/x/o performers from the Philippines and its diaspora. Jacobo was a former Board Member of the Society of Trans Women of the Philippines (STRAP), a former President of the Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle (YCC) of the Philippines, a Founding Co-Editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Transgressive Journal of Literary Art and Co-Editor of BKL: Bikol/Bakla, Anthology of Bikolnon Gay Trans Queer Writing.She just released Arasahas, her debut volume of poetry in Filipino from Savage Mind Publishing House.
