Banned Books Book Club: Queer Edition | Castro

Submitted by the Event Organizer

“Celebrating banned books gives us the occasion to recognize books as the radical and subversive things that they are.” – Michelle Tea

Prepare yourself for an entire year of Banned Book Realness with Radar, as some of their most beloved writers read from books that have been banned or challenged, hosted by Michelle Tea.

Featuring readings by:

Nia King is the author of Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some Of Our Lives. She is also the host and producer of the podcast We Want the Airwaves. Her writing about race, gender, and sexuality has been published in the journal Women and Performance, the book Zines in Third Space, and the magazine make/shift. Her comics have been featured in Colorlines, Interrupt Mag, and in the Ladydrawers exhibition “Sex. Money. Race. Gender.” Her film, The Craigslist Chronicles, has screened at the National Queer Arts Festival, Queer Women of Color Film Festival, York University, University of Toronto, and NYU. In the fall of 2013, Nia toured the US with the POC Project Race Riot Tour as a performer. In spring of 2014, Nia toured the US and Canada with Mangos with Chili as their official tour documentarian. artactivistnia.com
READING FROM REVOLUTIONARY VOICES

Daniel Levesque: A native of Woonsocket, RI, Daniel LeVesque accepted his cosmically assigned career of Cosmetologist after attending the Arthur Angelo School of Cosmetology and Hair Design. His writing has appeared in Punk Globe and numerous anthologies. He is the author of Hairdresser on Fire.

Kevin Killian Poet, novelist, playwright, art critic, and scholar Kevin Killian earned a BA at Fordham University and an MA at SUNY-Stony Brook. Exploring themes of risk, iconography, invisibility, and vulnerability, Killian weaves fragments of misremembered conversation, sex, and cultural ephemera into his collage-based poems. In a 2009 interview with Tony Leuzzi for EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts, Killian discussed the connection he feels to visual art in his approach to poetry: “I do think of myself as an artist in that high-flown way I associate with the visual arts: it’s all in the gesture. It doesn’t matter if the poem is good or bad. What matters is the gesture I’m making with it.”

Baruch Porras-Hernandez is a writer, performer, and organizer, based in San Francisco. He has performed his writing all over California, and featured at shows in Washington D.C., L.A., NYC, and Canada. His poetry appears in several anthologies, he has been featured as a writer in the bay area everywhere from LitCrawl, Write Club, Writers with Drinks, to the Radar Reading Series, and is a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry. For the past 5 years he’s been the curator and head organizer for The San Francisco Queer Open Mic and regularly puts together literary shows and festivals, most recently the ¿Donde Esta Mi Gente? festival of Latino Poetry and Spoken Word and organized two big literary shows with KQED. He has been a resident artist at the spoken word program at the Banff Center in Alberta Canada, and the A.I.R. Program at The Garage, a Space for Performance Art, and his solo show, Reasons to Stay on the Ground, had it’s world premiere in San Francisco made possible by a grant from the National Queer Arts Festival. He was born in Toluca, Mexico, grew up in Albany, California, and he likes gummy bears. Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence

Nan Alamilla Boyd (B.A., History, UC Berkeley; M.A. and Ph.D., American Civilization, Brown University) is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University. She teaches courses in the history of sexuality, queer theory, historical methodology, and urban tourism. She has published reviews and articles in Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Radical History Review, English Language Notes, Women’s Review of Books, Signs, Frontiers, Gender & Society, Denver University Law Review, and Radical Philosophy Review. Her book, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965(University of California Press, 2003), charts the rise of gay and lesbian politics in San Francisco and draws from the 45 oral histories she conducted as part of her research. Her second book,Bodies of Evidence, the Practice of Queer Oral History (Oxford, 2012), co-edited with Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, pairs fourteen oral history excerpts alongside commentaries by oral historians. Nan has also been a long-time volunteer at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. She founded the Historical Society’s oral history project in 1992, served as co-chair of the Archives Committee from 2004-2008, and served two terms on the Board of Directors. She is currently at work on a third book project, a history of tourism in San Francisco that explores the neoliberal commodification of racialized and sexualized neighborhoods.

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