Friday, December 16, 2022

Poetry Project's New Year's Day Marathon

This year's marathon reading is LIVE in person, but also ONLINE from anywhere in the world!

Please CLICK HERE for details
Please CLICK HERE for online viewing

I LOVE spending my birthday at this annual fundraiser
And THIS YEAR I am offering tarot readings throughout the day
Tarot readings are by appointment, please contact info at Poetry Project

MANY THANKS to EVERYONE working hard at The Poetry Project



Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Online award ceremony for the 2022 PEN Literary Awards

December 3rd LIVE at THIS LINK to the library Facebook page
Please CLICK HERE for award details

5pm Boston, Massachusetts
2pm Oakland, California

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

AMSTERDAM November 23rd and 24th

SANDBERG ART INSTITUTE

November 23rd I will have a conversation about queerness and poetry with Jamil Fiorino Habib as part of the opening symposium. Please CLICK HERE 

November 24th 5 to 7 pm is a public lecture about my new work

Please contact unsettling@rietveldacademie.nl

MANY THANKS to everyone for inviting me!



Monday, November 21, 2022

French translation of my book While Standing in Line for Death

Please click HERE for the book

Gratitude to Elsa Boyer and Camille Pageard
for their incredible work as translators

Many thanks to Frederick Boyer, Jean-Paul
Hirsch, Victoire Le Sager, Shannon Guillou,
and the many other people who work hard
making books at P.O.L



Monday, November 14, 2022

Events in Paris Nov. 17 and 18

I am very excited to read from the French translation of
Translated by Elsa Boyer and Camille Pageard

Nov. 17th 6pm at AFTER 8 BOOKS

and 

Nov. 18th 1pm at THIS LINK



Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Immaterial Ecologies. A gathering to resynchronise land and body. Lisbon, Portugal

Poetry Session with CAConrad, Ellen Lima and Rita Natálio

4pm Sunday, November 6th

Art library
Av. de Berna, 45A, Lisbon

Details at THIS LINK

Many thanks to Alex Diaz and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation



Saturday, October 15, 2022

Interview in The Greenfield Recorder

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ
 
Many thanks to Mary Byrne for the opportunity to talk about poetry in a newspaper!





Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Sunday, October 9, 2022

SERAFINE 1369'S Visions: October 2022

GROPIUS Bau

I am very happy to be one of the 8 artists 
at this year's Berliner Festspiele!
I have 18 poems with audio installed

Please CLICK HERE for details
MANY THANKS to Jamila!






Saturday, October 8, 2022

"Spelling the amulet, the shape, the poem CAConrad's AMANDA PARADISE and Jewish ritual bowls," by Robert Eric Shoemaker

Many thanks to Robert Eric Shoemaker
Please CLICK HERE to read his essay

This photo is of my cup from last night's Full Moon TASSEOMANCY (tea leaf reading) session at Alchemy of Avalon in Greenfield; I LOVE THIS PLACE, and the Dark Goddess tea and Samhain incense have me buzzing in all the right ways today!



Monday, October 3, 2022

FUNDRAISER for Bloof Books!

ALL MONEY goes to the production of more books of poetry from this AMAZING independent publisher! PLEASE CLICK HERE TO SEE THE SITE FOR 27 different perks!

Shanna Compton was my first editor at Soft Skull Press, and she is ONE DAMN FINE POET ♦️♦️♦️



Monday, September 26, 2022

2022 Ruth Lilly Prize

Please click HERE for details

This is an incredible honor to win this award!
And to win it alongside so many brilliant poets!



Monday, September 19, 2022

SONIC DIVINATIONS for 4 Queens

Special guest CAConrad for one-hour of
Creative Writing & Divinatory Poetics

SUNDAY, September 25th
11 am Boston time
10 am Chicago time
9 am Denver time

$10 PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

For the hour, I have designed a unique SONIC DIVINATION in which we look at how we can tune into various frequencies to enhance our writing. Our human bodies are occult tools VIBRATING with 70% water, absorbing sound; let's use it to WRITE!

photo of me by Augusto Cascales



Thursday, September 8, 2022

Saturday, September 10th in Hudson, New York

I'm performing at Basilica Hudson and Pathway to ParisBASILICA GREEN Benefit Concert in Hudson, NY on 9/10. An evening of collective performance and conversation in the spirit of arts x eco action, all in a solar-powered, reclaimed industrial factory on the Hudson River. 

Tickets on sale now at THIS LINK












Tuesday, September 6, 2022

GIGANTIC SYCAMORE Equinox Poetry Reading

Please click HERE for details about the tree

Dara Barrois/Dixon told me about the tree years ago
I asked her how to find it
She said, "OH just drive to Sunderland on Main street, YOU CAN'T MISS IT!"

CELEBRATE Autumnal Equinox with a poem at The Giant Tree
A little video I made some years ago

Sunday, September 18th at 1pm
Sunderland, Massachusetts
PLEASE PARK at the town library: 20 School St.

PLEASE BRING 1 poem to read at the sycamore 
(either by yourself or another poet)





Sunday, September 4, 2022

MANATEE / HUMANITY by Anne Waldman

SEPTEMBER 7TH, 2022
6pm Boston time
5pm Chicago time
4pm Denver time

Over 2 dozen poets reading from 
Anne Waldman's brilliant, watershed text

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Event is FREE, but everyone is encouraged to
please donate to SAVE THE MANATEE



Thursday, September 1, 2022

2022 PEN Josephine Miles Awards for Poetry

I am very happy about AMANDA PARADISE winning this award!

Please CLICK HERE for details
(their website will be updated soon)
  

Sunday, August 14, 2022

Møllebyen Litteraturfestival 2022

Thursday, August 25th in OSLO: Please CLICK HERE
26th and 27th in Moss (see below)

PLEASE SEE 
THIS LINK FOR 
FESTIVAL DETAILS

I am very excited to be part of this year's festival at HOUSE // OF // FOUNDATION in Moss, Norway

Many thanks to AUDIATUR and Martin M. Sørhaug for inviting me
Many thanks to Martin Ingebrigtsen for translating Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

Later this year AUDIATUR will publish a Norwegian translation of While Standing in Line for Death, translated by Gunnar Wærness and Martin Ingebrigtsen (MANY THANKS TO Gunnar & Martin!)

Gunnar Wærness also translated The Book of Frank




Saturday, August 6, 2022

Chocolate Peach Float is a Bit of Dreamy Vegan

2 small peaches
4 squares of unsweetened 100% dark chocolate
3/4 cup of rosewater

Pellegrino non-flavored

Try to have the peaches, rosewater, and Pellegrino in the refrigerator for 24 hours. Make the drink by placing the chopped pitted peaches in a blender with room temperature dark chocolate and chilled rosewater. Blend until it is frothy, then fill half a glass. Fill the remaining half with chilled Pellegrino. 

This drink is like an ice cream float but without the dairy and added sugar. The Pellegrino water's calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate, potassium, sodium, and other minerals will enhance the texture and flavor. If you use soda water, please add a pinch of salt to give it a boost.

One of the things I am working on is a cookbook where each recipe also has a (Soma)tic poetry ritual so we can write poems while cooking!

I think the name of my collection of recipes and (Soma)tic poetry rituals will be
Goddamned Vegan and Delicious!

The brand-new chapbook in the photo is 
FIREFLY by Joshua Beckman

I'M TELLING YOU I READ IT FROM BEGINNING TO END AND LIVE WITH IT then read it again from beginning to end AND LIVE WITH IT some more!

It is a little pricey, BUT WORTH EVERY PENNY... beautiful photographs with the poetry!
If we're going to splurge DO IT ON POETRY! Order online at THIS LINK!




Tuesday, August 2, 2022

new (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual and poem in Issue 6 of VISIBLE BINARY magazine

Please CLICK HERE to read the issue

many thanks to Patrick Pethybridge, Carolina Ebeid, and Jeffrey Pethybridge





Sunday, July 24, 2022

COMING OFF THE ROAD (for a little while): a decade of queer sex in all fifty states ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★


I wrote this poem three years ago. At first, it was about looking for another place to feel at home, but after a year, I had to admit that my car was my home and that I enjoyed constantly meeting new people and sharing our thoughts about being alive. For the past decade, I have lived nowhere, something that made family and friends nervous because we worry over the ones we love. When people understood that I was a vagabond, they truly opened up to me; I became their glitter-trans confessional. Exchanging secrets is my bounty. So long as I don't have to tell jokes to entertain. I fucking hate how witty we queers are expected be. I'll ruin your party, just invite me and find out.

My boyfriend Tre is a truck driver for an international retailer. We met at the world's largest truck stop on route 80 in Iowa and began a relationship I never imagined possible. Neither of us felt we were simply hooking up and cherished our connection from the start. We agreed to rendezvous whenever crossing the country. Everyone talks about the first time with someone being special, but for us, it was the second time because we knew this was the beginning and that we would enjoy one another in every possible way and in many different places.

We have connected in all the lower 48 states, from one end of Canada to the other, and down into our favorite place on the planet, Mexico. When North Carolina passed their anti-trans HB2 law, we had sex in his truck as close to the state capitol as possible. I had wanted to have sex with him in the capitol bathroom, but sex in his truck was the compromise. When Idaho passed their anti-trans law recently, we had sex outside the capitol building in Boise, Idaho. We have got to get our love back every chance we can. This world does not belong to the violent witch-burning Christians of America, and we need to live like we know it is true! Every fucking chance to be with the one you love to keep the walls from closing around us.

Friends say I should write a memoir, but I wrote two books on the road, three when considering all the new work. While Standing in Line for Death has three different political-action (Soma)tic poetry rituals for confronting heterosexual violence. The joy I experienced with most of the people I met comes through in the poems; no more memoir than that is necessary. After that book, I decided to design a larger (Soma)tic poetry ritual around living on the road, which became AMANDA PARADISE. I am Amanda Paradise and always have been. Though I regret none of my decisions, I would never want to relive my close calls with several guns pointed at me, knives, and being surrounded by half a dozen brutes in Alabama when they caught me sleeping in my car. You always have to put up with something but try like hell to survive whatever that something is.

Tre knows I am writing this. Even this next part, how our relationship is fragile because of his inability to control himself when the occasional anti-queer sentiment gets thrown at us. He had not experienced this until he met me because I made him visible. I am not a code switcher; what you see is what you get: trans, lots of glitter, bright colors, faggy voice, and I don't give a fuck what anyone wants or expects. At the same time, I understand the danger and when to get out of town to keep on living. Does he scream at people when they call me a faggot because he is protecting me, or does the shame he feels fill him with rage when others see our love as anything but the warmth he knows is real? Our fights are always after these incidents, which escalate in terrifying flashes until I'm dragging us out of the diner or bar, wherever it happens. Our fights end with me getting in my car and driving away after yelling that he will get us stabbed in a parking lot because he can't take a few stupid words. Drama on the road has many shitty destinations to choose, and in the end, it is heterosexual violence that comes between us, one way or the other. How would straight people feel if we got our faces between their holy, sanctioned unions? The same people would still want to kill us, maybe more so.

We have watched the sun go down on mountains, beaches, forests, and deserts. Each time I have sex in new surroundings with this same man, the sex constantly changes with the climate, elevation, humidity, salt air, or dry; it's impossible to get bored of our company. We end each night reading a book of poems out loud together, passing it back and forth. The books are a post-fornication ritual tool, and I feel each poem in ways I had never known.

This fall and next spring, I will be teaching poetry full-time. I am excited about my new apartment in Greenfield, Massachusetts. I signed a lease, and it felt good. If I belong to anything in this world, it is poetry. It would be easy to say poetry saved me, and I could make that argument, but I prefer focusing on how I like belonging to its spaces each day and how it delivers a concentration on life in ways nothing else can provide for me. I feel like a bride of poetry. Don't be weird about this, you can be a bride of poetry too. Poetry has as many arms as the goddess pulling the cable cars uphill. I want that wedding—an orange and purple gown with a notebook and pen at the altar along the road. A little barbed wire to rest elbows. Have you seen all the fucking barbed wire in this world? Jesus fucking christ! Fuck all this wire lining the property of the birds, deer, snakes, and toads! Bring your wire cutters; we have work to do!

Thursday, July 21, 2022

A series of photos of the art exhibition of my poetry in Santander, Spain on ART VIEWER

MANY THANKS to Alexander Alonso Díaz and everyone at fluent gallery in Santander, Spain for the beauty and care they gave my work. The show was titled "13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang's Return," (March 31st to June 10th, 2022)

PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR 
THE ART VIEWER PHOTOS

MANY THANKS also to Augusto Cascales, who made a film of my play The Obituary Show, which was also part of the exhibition in Santander.

My mother suddenly and unexpectedly died while the show was still up, and I am sad that I never got to share these photos with her.



Wednesday, July 20, 2022

GLITTER IN MY WOUNDS at Metropolis Contemporary

Please CLICK HERE for details on July 28th opening

New exhibition group show named after 

MANY THANKS to everyone
at Metropolis Contemporary

170 Edward Street
BN2 0JB, Brighton



Sunday, July 10, 2022

this is an excerpt from my tribute to Callie Gardner in The Poetry Review (((REST IN PEACE Dear Poet ❤️)))

PLEASE Click HERE for The Poetry Review issue

PLEASE Click HERE for Callie's book


Callie Gardner, I Want to Keep Speaking with You

by CAConrad                                                                             for Gloria Dawson




Poet Callie Gardner’s sudden death on July 8th, 2021, is still difficult to believe. What follows is a conversation with Callie’s extraordinary collection, NATURALLY, IT IS NOT: A Poem in Four Letters. They were among the finest poets I have had the privilege to know and read.



                                                if there would no longer 

be anything but differences, in that final term

of fragmentation, where does persistence of desire go?

(page 8)

 


Dear Callie, is desire still within each fragment, and is it that very desire where the strength lies to call the shards back home? Could desire itself end its given forecast of scarcity? We say Isis put Osiris back together, but She had much help from Nephthys, Thoth, and Anubis, working their delicate magic to stitch the beloved’s body back to wholeness.



with wind blowing in the same bare place

they can find a spirit within themselves

of the eye and location

(page 69)

 


In an essay about breaking your grandfather’s reading lamp handed down to you from your grandmother, you wrote, “When we attribute a particular relation to objects, they embody the success or failure of that relationship.” Regardless of the blowing wind, how still would we need to stand to become a location? What success would the spirit have in not abandoning us but insisting on filling us, being part of us until the location that is us disappears?


 

we were larval once

but without exchanging a cell

somewhere in this circumnavigation we became

in the creaking ancient timbers of shipped steel

just worms

(page 61)

 


(I light a candle, read this stanza aloud 3 times, “we were larval once….”) Thank you, Dear Poet.





















CLICK HERE for Callie's blog

Friday, July 1, 2022

GLITTER by Nicole Seymour

I am very excited to be included in this new book by Nicole Seymour. Do you think glitter is frivolous? IF YOU DO, IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO RETHINK GLITTER!

"to know glitter on a queer is not to dazzle but to
unsettle the foundation of this murderous culture"

Please click HERE for details





Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Green Linden ISSUE 13

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ

Many thanks to everyone at Green Linden



Tuesday, June 14, 2022

THANK YOU---

---Zach Ozma for publishing me on a Pride event sign!

even better than being published in Poetry Magazine



Tuesday, June 7, 2022

3 new poems in OSMOSIS

Please CLICK HERE to read the poems

Thank you to everyone at OSMOSIS!



Thursday, May 19, 2022

Critics' Pick in ARTFORUM

Please CLICK HERE to read the review!

Many thanks to everyone at fluent in Santander!

Sculpture poems from my book Amanda Paradise!



Tuesday, May 17, 2022

My Creative Capital Diary

Many thanks to Aliza Sena for creating this diary montage, and to everyone at Creative Capital! My book AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021) would not have been possible without their generous funding and other support!

Please CLICK HERE to see the diary

Monday, May 16, 2022

New poems in NAVIGATIONS

Please see THIS LINK to read the poems

Many thanks to Allison Hedge Coke


Monday, May 9, 2022

SOUNDING RITUAL with Will Montgomery ONLINE

PLEASE SEE THIS LINK TO REGISTER

Many thanks to everyone at Nottingham Contemporary




Thursday, April 28, 2022

The Poetry Project with Wo Chan!

PLEASE CLICK HERE for The Poetry Project 

PLEASE CLICK HERE to buy tickets

MANY THANKS TO Wave Books and Creative Capital who
made my book AMANDA PARADISE a reality!

NAROPA SUMMER WRITING PROGRAM

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Very excited about this year's in person workshop!








Tuesday, April 19, 2022

New poems and an interview

Please click THIS LINK to read new issue of A VELVET GIANT

Many thanks to Erika Walsh for her very thoughtful interview questions


Sunday, March 27, 2022

BRUSSELS ✪ LONDON ✪ SANTANDER ✪ April 2022

BRUSSELS

APRIL 1, 7:30PM
Fieldnotes event
62 Rue des Commercants
1000 Brussels
MANY THANKS George Finlay Ramsay



LONDON

APRIL 7, 6PM
Fieldnotes event
6 Cecil Court
London
WC2N 4HE

* * *

APRIL 18, 7PM
The Obituary Show premiere
281 Kingsland Road
LONDON
E2 8AS
MANY THANKS Augusto Cascales



SANTANDER

Exhibition of my poems
on display March 31 to June 10
I will give two performances
Friday, April 29 at 7pm
Saturday, April 30 at 12pm
MANY THANKS to Alex Alonso



Sunday, March 13, 2022

REHEARSING PHILADELPHIA: March 25 - April 10, 2022

THIS is the video of the performance:


Please click HERE for article in Philly Inquirer

Please click HERE for the main page

Click HERE for calendar and reservations

The Solo I wrote will take place on location at Community Legal Services, and the voice and performer will be the legendary Jonathan Stein.

27 ONWARD: Dancing in the Revolution
At the age of 27, Jonathan Stein fought for immigrants' rights at the U.S. Supreme Court alongside his colleagues and won. That was the 1970s, and just the beginning of a life spent making room for compassion in our harsh world. The attorneys at Community Legal Services have provided free legal aid and representation to low-income people for more than half a century. They have stood with those facing racism, poverty, and other forms of violence from unjust laws and institutions. For most of Jonathan’s legal aid career he pursued modern and post-modern dance and has performed in over two dozen dance works. He will be the voice of 27 ONWARD, performed inside the home of Community Legal Services at 1424 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. The stage will be set on the 2nd floor, overlooking a magnificent arch of historic Mercer tiles depicting images that celebrate the lives of working people. See you there!

Many thanks to Ari Benjamin Meyers for inviting me to write one of the Solos