Queer Writers Read: Regie Cabico, Reginald Harris, Richard McCann

Save the date! Mark your calendars!

Queer Writers Read: Regie Cabico, Reginald Harris, Richard McCann

Friday, April 17, 2009
2:30 p.m. - 4 p.m.
6137 McKeldin Library

Join Regie Cabico, Reginald Harris, and Richard McCann reading from their work and reflecting on the impact of Stonewall on contemporary queer writing.

Books will be available for sale and signing following the program.

Reading held in conjunction with the 2nd Annual DC Queer Studies Symposium
and 69/09 The Queer Afterlives of Stonewall

Writers' biographies:

Regie Cabico has appeared on two seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam and is a spoken word pioneer having taken top prizes in the National Poetry Slam and winning the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam. He is the first Asian American and openly Queer poet to come from the Poetry Slam movement taking top prizes in the 1993, 1994 & 1997 Natioal Poetry Slams and was named Bust Magaizne's 100 Men We Love. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Awards include 2 Larry Neal awards and fellowships from the DC Commission for the Arts, A Future Aesthetics Grant form The Ford Foundation and Hip Hop Theater Festival, 3 New York Innovative Theater Award Nominations. He is the artistic director of Sol & Soul, a Washington, DC arts & activist organization.

Recipient of Individual Artist Awards for both poetry and fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council, Reginald Harris is Help Desk and Training Manager for the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. Co-complier of Carry The World: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books (Vintage Entity Press, 2007), his first book, 10 Tongues (Three Conditions Press, 2001) was finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the ForeWord Book of the Year. A graduate of the Cave Canem: African American Poetry Workshop / Retreat, his poetry, fiction, reviews and articles have appeared in numerous journals and websites, including 5 AM, African-American Review, Beltway, Blithe House Quarterly, Black Issues Book Review, Gargoyle,  smartish pace, Sou'wester; the Best Black Gay Erotica, Best Gay Poetry 2008, Bum Rush the Page, Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Writing and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South anthologies; and is a contributor to LGBTQ America Today: An Encyclopedia (John C. Hawley, editor) and Encyclopedia of Contemporary Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Literature of the United States (Emmanuel S. Nelson, editor; forthcoming 2009).

Richard McCann is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a work of fiction, and Ghost Letters, a collection of poems (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award, 1933 Capricorn Poetry Award). He is also the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic, Ms., Esquire, Ploughshares, Tin House, and the Washington Post Magazine, and in numerous anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 and Best American Essays 2000. He is currently working on a memoir, The Resurrectionist, which explores the experience and meanings of illness and mortality through a narrative exploration of his experience as a liver transplant recipient. For his work, Richard McCann has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, on whose Board of Trustees he served from 2000-2008. He earned his MA in Creative Writing and Modern Literature from Hollins University and his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa, where he was a Rockefeller Fellow. He grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and he has lived in numerous places, including Sweden, Germany, and Spain. He now lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University. He also serves the Board of Directors of the PEN Faulkner Foundation and is a Member of the Corporation of Yaddo.

DC Queer Studies is a group of faculty from schools in the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area formed in 2006 to discuss new works in the field and to exchange, support, and cultivate new ways of engaging with LGBT/Queer/Sexuality Studies across the disciplines and across institutions.  The complete program for the April 17-18 symposium is available at http://www.lgbts.umd.edu.

The DC Queer Studies Symposium is sponsored by:  University of Maryland (Departments of English and Women's Studies, the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies in the Department of History, LGBT Studies Program, Office of Undergraduate Studies); American University (College of Arts and Sciences); Georgetown University (Department of English, Graduate School); the George Washington University (Departments of American Studies and English, University Writing Program).