black trans love is black trans wealth*
We write this call to Black Trans, gender-non-conforming, and non-binary folk with excitement and urgency...
It is our time to add our voices and our stories to a vibrant Black queer literary lineage. We have spoken to so many who, like us, first found our voices through the living literatures of people like James Baldwin, Toni Cade-Bambara, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Marlon Riggs, and Joseph Beam. We must now tell our own stories, so that our younger siblings and our kinfolk who are Black and Trans and GNC know that they, too, have a lineage: a heritage, complicated and nuanced, but here nonetheless, in this life. We have the honor of being the offspring of Black feminists, Black gay men, Black Lesbians, Black queer and Trans people around the globe. Let us now continue in the legacy of Black courage, liberation and love by adding our tales to the bubbling pot of gumbo, as Marlon Riggs might say. Let this collection and your stories make the pot richer. Join in the chorus of Black queer survival and revival. Let our courage today nourish the courage of those who will surely come behind us, those whose names we may not yet know. For many of us, it was both the kitchen table and the life that nourished our Black queer beings. Please join us by adding your voice to this collection, the first Anthology of Black Trans and GNC writing.
Deadline for Submissions: February 11, 2018
About the Editors
Dora Santana is a Black Brazilian trans woman warrior scholar activist artist who believes in the trans-formative power of stories embodied in flesh, in language and in ancestral energies. She is also interested in how our diasporic transitionings can offer ways of imagining and forging socio-political-love communities. In her case, transitioning between Brazil and the US; between Portuguese and English; between the secular and the sacred, are some of her routes of crossing. Healing for her comes in the form of networking, of individual and collective dialogic creation as counter voices to imposed distorted imaginaries of black queer/trans/gnc bodies as a threat. Currently she is a PhD Candidate in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where her work focuses on what she calls Trans Quilombismo/Marronage as strategy to achieve freedom.
Evolve Benton identifies as royal, black, queer and artist. They love using the mediums of writing poetry, essays, letters, and drawing illustrations to heal from racial battle fatigue, homophobia, and transphobia they have experienced. Evolve believes transformative healing can happen through the use and creation of art and a commitment to experiencing and uplifting love. Evolve is the co-founder of Theta Xi Theta, Fraternity, Inc. and earned their MFA in Poetry from Antioch University Los Angeles where they produced a paper on “Black Queer Harlem in the Era of the 1920’s” and their first book of poetry and illustrations. Evolve has been published in the Dillard Review (2008), Trans bodies, Trans Selves (2014) and Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity (2016).
Kai M. Green is a shape-shifting Black Queer nerd boi, An Afro-Future, freedom dreaming, rhyme slinging dragon slayer in search of a new world. He is a writer, scholar, poet, filmmaker, abolitionist, feminist and whatever else it takes to make a new and more just world. Kai is a proud member of BYP100 (Black Youth Project) where he sits on the healing and safety council. He is also an assistant professor of Women's Gender & Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Williams College.