A Queen in Bucks County

*¿¿Author wrote book in 2016-2017 when she was living in New Jersey and traveling to Philly for grindr hookups. She says, "I was bored, broke and lonely, and then I was in the hospital for a while, and I wanted to talk to my friends. I thought about how hard it is in certain arrangements of sexual and gender life to talk about sex and gender honestly with the people you're fucking....Writing a series of letters in persona solved a number of problems at once: I could talk about myself without feeling like I was caving to the biographical imperative that structures a lot of trans literature, or disclosing or explaining myself to a gratified viewer. I could explore the largely repressed but widely present overlap between gay and trans forms of intimacy. I could talk about how rent-burdened I was, and how hard I found it to stay at the same address. Letters are extraordinarily permissive; direct address even more so. I took a bath in permission and I never got out of it.
*Author is well connected in the New York poetry community as a co-founder and editor of Vetch: A Magazine of Trans Poetry and Poetics, co-curater of the Segue Series, and member of the Poetry Project Newsletter's editorial collective.
*Author is co-editor of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, which was a finalist for Publishing Triangle and Lambda Literary awards. Her work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Social Text, The Recluse, The Believer, and elsewhere.
*Author has been selected for many grants, fellowships, and residencies including The Poetry Project's Emerge-Surface-Be fellowship and Lambda Literary fellowship.
*Author is a union organizer for adjunct instructors. When she's not teaching she's also organizing against jails, prisons, and policing.
*Author has taught Writing at NYU, Cooper Union, Princeton, Prison Teaching Initiative, Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library as well as being a workshop leader at the the Poetry Project and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
*Author holds a B.A. in Classics and Philosophy from Columbia University, an MPhil in Classics from Cambridge and a PhD from Princeton.
*Author is very active on social media
@unit01barbie (twitter)
@unit01barbie (Instagram)