Mouth to Mouth: Open Mic & Showcase

Mic Check! Are you a writer? Come share your work at our next edition of our open mic and showcase, Mouth to Mouth. Hosted by AAWW Fam poets Kay Ulanday Barrett and Jaden Fields and featuring J Mase III and Demian DinéYazhi´.

Mouth to Mouth seeks to provide a safer community space for queer and trans BIPOC folx and and rising migrant artists. We uplift these voices and ask all allies to step back and show your support by cheering our performers on.

Kay Ulanday Barrett (@brownroundboi) is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist; their collection More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Book Honor Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Barrett has featured at Lincoln Center, the United Nations, Symphony Space, the Poetry Foundation, Princeton University, the Hemispheric Institute, and the Brooklyn Museum. They’ve received fellowships from MacDowell, Lambda Literary Review, Macondo, and VONA. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Asian American Literary Review, them., NYLON, Vogue, Buzzfeed, The Advocate, Frontier Poetry, The Rumpus, RaceForward, and more. Currently, they remix their mama’s recipes in Jersey City with their jowly dog. www.kaybarrett.net

Jaden Fields is an LA-based poet, cultural worker, and educator whose work centers the healing possibilities of marginalized communities. For the past few years, he has advocated in solidarity with queer, trans, and intersex communities. Jaden has facilitated healing-centered writing workshops for queer and trans writers. He has performed all over Los Angeles, including LA Pride, Long Beach Pride, Venice Pride, and DTLA Proudfest. Jaden self-published his first chapbook, Intentional Musings on Staying Alive When I Want To Die (2019), an honest depiction of navigating mental health and systemic oppression, and leaning into his own healing.

J Mase III is a Black/Trans/queer poet & educator based in Seattle by way of Philly. As an educator, Mase has worked with community members in the US, UK, and Canada on the needs of LGBTQIA+ folks and racial justice in spaces such as K-12 schools, universities, faith communities and restricted care facilities. He is founder of awQward, the first trans and queer people of color talent agency. J Mase is author of And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment & Inappropriate Jokes About Death as well as White Folks Be Trippin’: An Ethnography Through Poetry & Prose. His work has been featured on MSNBC, Essence Live, Everyday Feminism, Black Girl Dangerous, the New York Times, Buzzfeed, Blavity, the Root, the Huffington Post, TEDx and more. Currently, he is head writer for the theatrical production Black Bois and is co-editor of the Black Trans Prayer Book. Find him on Instagram (@jmaseiii) and www.jmaseiii.com!

Demian DinéYazhi´ (born 1983) is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative, supremacist nature of hetero cis gender communities. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, colonial manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center their politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land it wrongfully occupies and refuses to rightfully give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail. @heterogeneoushomosexual