Trans Longevity: A Poetry & Poetics Symposium

MARCH 28-29 with TRISH SALAH, CACONRAD, KAY GABRIEL, TAYLOR JOHNSON

The concept of “trans longevity” engages with all that enables more-than-survival for transpeople today, for a long time to come. While attending to the precariousness of trans lives, trans longevity resists the specter of death organizing (cis) narratives and institutional configurations of transness – and is informed instead by trans archives that emphatically assert trans presence, by trans histories that offer templates for continuation through and beyond our present. If trans futurity seems to require a leap to better times ahead, trans longevity proposes trans-futures in more tangible, scalable terms, supplying lived links embedded in today and its enduring pasts to a renovated collective long-haul.

Thursday, March 28, 7:30pm | 403 Hayes Hall, South Campus

Trish Salah, Associate Professor of Gender Studies, Queen’s University

keynote: “when i was nine and yearning”: trans poetics before and beyond the ‘cis’

Friday, March 29, 1:30pm | 107 Capen Hall

Ana Grujić & Adrienne Hill, Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project

trans histories in Buffalo

Friday, March 29, 3:00pm | Poetry Collection, 420 Capen Hall

trans in the archive presentation

Kay Gabriel, CAConrad, & Taylor Johnson, panelists

trans longevity: poetry & poetics

Friday, March 29, 7:30pm |Just Buffalo, 468 Washington St.

group poetry reading featuring symposium guests, Poetics & Just Buffalo communities

Trish Salah is author of  Wanting in Arabic and Lyric Sexology Vol. 1. She is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University and edits the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry.

CAConrad‘s latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, while The Book of Frank is now available in 9 languages. They have received the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award.

Kay Gabriel is author of A Queen in Bucks County and Kissing Other People or the House of Fame, and co-editor of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. She’s Editorial Director at The Poetry Project, where she edits the Poetry Project Newsletter.

Taylor Johnson is author of Inheritance, winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award, among other honors. He has received the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers among others and was the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. He co-curates the Green Way Reading Series.