As Carmen Maria Machado writes, "I believe in a world where impossible things happen." Come for a night of queer and trans lit and community, a night of being impossible things imagining impossible things for our world and what we make of it. Featuring Adele Failes-Carpenter, Maria Derrick, Tala | mecca khanmalek, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, and Alexis Aceves Garcia.
Adele Failes-Carpenter (she/her) is a queer parent, public educator, and labor organizer residing on Ohlone land where she teaches Women’s and Gender Studies at City College of San Francisco. Adele has spent decades organizing with young people, GI resisters, anti-war veterans, and labor unions. As a writer and educator, she aims to tend abolitionist imagining and is committed to ongoing experiments in solidarity and the proliferation of possible futures. Adele was a Lambda Literary Summer 2024 fellow in Creative Nonfiction and is a MFA candidate at Antioch University in Los Angeles.
Maria Derrick (they/elle) is a trans, nonbinary, mixed 3rd-generarion Mexican American who grew up in Altadena, California. They are currently a student at City College San Francisco and taking a Poetry For The People class under the bestest teacher evva, Tehmina Khan. They love slinkies and disco music. They value community, silliness, kindness, revolutionary optimism, and a Free Palestine, Sudan, and Congo in our lifetime.
Tala Khanmalek | mecca monarch (all pronouns) is a queer, Iranian writer, editor, and scholar based in Berkeley, CA. They earned a PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley and were formerly a professor of gender and sexuality studies. They are currently the Reviews and Interviews editor of Apogee and a Creative Capital Award fellow with heidi andrea restrepo rhodes. They publish creative work in a wide range of genres, including memoir, poetry, plays, and everything in between.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are a professor of queer, feminist, and disability studies, poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal, and have been awarded fellowships with Zoeglossia, CantoMundo, Yale, and Radar Productions. Their previously published books include: The Inheritance of Haunting, Ephemeral, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, and Wayward Creatures. They live in Tongva lands in southern California.
Alexis Aceves Garcia is a t-boy poet & educator dreaming against the state. Their cross-discipline experiments glitch traditional poetic form to construct trans time & non-linear meaning-making. You can find their work in The Hopkins Review, Poets.org’s “Poem-A-Day” series, The Slowdown, The Best of the Net Anthology 2022, among others. Aceves Garcia has received fellowships from The Outpost Foundation, Jack Jones Literary Arts, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. Their latest callings include bringing plant offerings to the ocean and escaping linear time. Follow them on Instagram @loveloaf_.