Buffalo Area Poetry & Literature Calendar (week of March 25-March 31)

Tuesday, 7 p.m.: The University at Buffalo Distinguished Speaker Series presents poet Amanda Gorman, first-ever Youth Poet Laureate of the United States and 2021 Presidential Inaugural Poet. Center for the Arts, University at Buffalo North Campus. Tickets for this event were listed as being sold out as of 3/24, but check with www.buffalo.edu/ub-speakers for some additional availability on secondary markets.

Thursday and Friday, March 28 & 29:

Trans Longevity: A Poetry & Poetics Symposium with Trish Salah, CAConrad, Kay Gabriel, and Taylor   Johnson.

Symposium statement: The concept of “trans longevity” engages with all that enables more-than-survival for transpeople today, for a long time to come. While attending to the precariousness of trans lives, trans longevity resists the specter of death organizing (cis) narratives and institutional configurations of transness – and is informed instead by trans archives that emphatically assert trans presence, by trans histories that offer templates for continuation through and beyond our present. If trans futurity seems to require a leap to better times ahead, trans longevity proposes trans-futures in more tangible, scalable terms, supplying lived links embedded in today and its enduring pasts to a renovated collective long-haul.

A list of the symposium events follows:

Thursday, 7:30 p.m.: Trish Salah, Associate Professor of Gender Studies, Queen’s University delivers the keynote lecture “when i was nine and yearning”: trans poetics before and beyond the ‘cis’". 403 Hayes Hall, University at Buffalo South Campus.

Friday, 1:30 p.m.: Ana Grujić & Adrienne Hill, Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project present a talk on trans histories in Buffalo. 107 Capen Hall, University at Buffalo North Campus.

Friday, 3:00 p.m.: Trans in the archive presentation featuring Kay Gabriel, CAConrad, & Taylor Johnson, panelists, trans longevity: poetry & poetics symposium. Poetry Collection, 420 Capen Hall, University at Buffalo North Campus.


Friday, 7:30 p.m.: Group poetry reading featuring symposium guests Trish Salah, CAConrad, Kay Gabriel, and Taylor  Johnson joining with the UB Poetics and  Just Buffalo Literary Center communities.

About the poets: 

Trish Salah is author of  Wanting in Arabic and Lyric Sexology Vol. 1. She is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University and edits the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry.

CAConrad‘s latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, while The Book of Frank is now available in 9 languages. They have received the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award.

Kay Gabriel is author of A Queen in Bucks County and Kissing Other People or the House of Fame, and co-editor of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. She’s Editorial Director at The Poetry Project, where she edits the Poetry Project Newsletter.

Taylor Johnson is author of Inheritance, winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award, among other honors. He has received the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers among others and was the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. He co-curates the Green Way Reading Series. Just Buffalo Literary Center, 468 Washington St., 2nd floor.