Summer 2023
JUNE 2023 – Queer PRIDE!
June has been glorious & exhausting! Thank you to @onbeing for featuring my sad childhood pantoum & making me cry tears of artistic affirmation! 💜To experience this feature of my poem, go here.
ID:
sunset, people walk on beach. black text: #Poetry Unbound, June 12, 2023. Text highlighted in teal: ” Kay Ulanday Barrett – Pantuom for recital when my mom said, don’t let them see you cry. Gratitude to @onbeing + @padraigotuama.
May 2023 – Featured in Autostraddle + DapperQ
In “dapperQ Style: Ungendering Fashion,” Queer Style Is Centered and Celebrated
Thank you so much Anita for including my ideas and for curating such a sharp and beautifully queer anthology.
ID: bold text “How Can We Be Resourceful and Accessible and Not Enforce Those Dominant Abled, Cultured Ways?” By @dapperq + @anitadolcevita + @autostraddle. Brown round queer with blue sunglasses & cane wears leather black shorts, patterned blue & black collared shirt outside. 📷 by @thestreetsensei
WINTER 2022-2023
Hello everyone,
Many thanks to wonderful host and essayist Jordan Kisner for Thresholds on Literary Hub. Here, I talk about writing essays and poems and share some of my writing that amplifies how food is a conduit to community and to familial connection.
“Before the Words Became Pages, We Were Eating.” Why Kay Ulanday Barrett’s Best Poems Are About Food
This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the essay collection Thin Places, and brought to you by Lit Hub Radio.
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In this episode, Jordan talks with poet/performer/advocate Kay Ulanday Barrett (More Than Organs) about their decision to get top surgery, the intersection of family and food, and writing through health crises.
Please feel free to access the full transcript and feature here.
FALL + WINTER 2022
Tin House Residency 2022 & more
Nov-Dec 2022
I am happy to announce that I will be in the Pacific Northwest for a month from November to December, working on my latest writing projects. Here’s the announcement:
While in residency, Kay Ulanday Barrett will continue to work on their new poetry collection, Root Systems and also editing a collection of essays, Eat Good for Me. Through an array of forms, Root systems examines ancestral connection and disabled life as a trans brown person. Eat Good For Me explores a trans Filipinx in grief and growing up not to mention the recipes that keep them alive.
[VIRTUAL] Writing Club at Home: On Wholeness with Kay Ulanday Barrett
December 2022
In collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, AAWW Presents Writing Club at Home with guest writer Kay Ulanday Barrett to facilitate a virtual workshop on wholeness and assemblage. Kay Ulanday Barrett will introduce works of art by Alfonso Ossario and Adrian Piper, share a series of creative writing prompts, and offer the opportunity for writers from around the globe to gather in a calm, supportive, and welcoming environment.
Writing Club is part of the Artful Practices for Well-Being initiative, where we seek to offer a space for connectedness and healing through art.
Summer + Fall 2022
AWARD-WINNING POET AND DISABILITY ACTIVIST, KAY ULANDAY BARRETT, OPENS UP ABOUT INTERSECTIONALITY IN THE QUEER COMMUNITY
On this episode of In The Know: The Truth Is, Chella Man (@chellaman) and Aaron Rose Philip (@aaron___philip) are joined by award-winning poet and disability activist, Kay Ulanday Barrett (@brownroundboi). Kay talks about living as a disabled Filipinx-American transgender queer person, intersectionality, and how to approach and overcome challenges related to one’s (intersectional) identity.
To set the stage for their discussion, Kay defines intersectionality. “First of all, intersectionality was created by Black feminists,” Kay shares. “Kimberlé Crenshaw utilized the word ‘intersectionality’ to discuss that Black people and Black women are more than just one or the other. So when we’re talking about intersectionality in terms of us, you’re not just one single issue, as Audre Lorde would put it. We’re whole bodies, whole lives. So intersectionality is: how do we interact with the world? Moreover, how do systems, the state, police, any other place with a bunch of people treat people based on how we breathe in society?”
Kay then goes on to talk about how intersectionality is what allows people to be their full selves, rather than just one part of who they are. “Like for me, being Asian, or being working class, or being disabled, or being trans—not one thing is a priority,” says Kay. “They all hug, kiss, overlap. And they also build a lot of tension because of white abled supremacy.”
NOW BOOKING - FALL + WINTER 2022
Spring 2022
Dear friends & siblings,
I’m published in Poem-a-day on @poetsorg for my poem “Root Systems.” Thank you @ilya_poet for your curation! Thanks to @macondowriters & Macondistas for holding the space for this poem. Thank you @macdowell1907 for helping me polish this poem alive.
I ferociously miss my family during holidays & to know that my Auntie Yoly, my favorite person, my first kindred (Taurus wonder), & my favorite ancestor is able to be honored in this way feels like the gift of gifts. Feels like a channel to commemorate her beyond bloodlines & back into the earth. Listen: Anything I know about plants, the very home I’m building now in its green majesty, every herb I’ve grown, every recipe I stir, comes directly from her influence. She raised me when my mom couldn’t because work, sickness, trauma, all of it.
To us, to the ghosts we love, & to the people who became them. P.s. To eating lychees on a 90F June day sa San Fabian & tsismis forever!
* Note: Please view this poem in your poem-a-day email on your macbook/computers for best experience! Web browsers on cellphones don’t let her full form breathe the way she’s meant to breathe!
READ MORE HERE:
Kay Ulanday Barrett on Poem-a-day: January 2022
LATEST UPDATE: FEBRUARY 2022
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Exciting news—
Named by the American Library Association as a 2021 Barbara Gittings Stonewall Honor Book in Literature + 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry!
NOW AVAILABLE: Order here
MORE THAN ORGANS
By Kay Ulanday Barrett
Distributed by Ingram and Sibling Rivalry Press
Author is available for appearances and interviews
For Booking Inquiries: kaybarrett.net/booking
Publisher Contact: info@siblingrivalrypress.com
Trade, library, and educational discounts available. Desk copies available for educators.
Download the Press Sheet
Visit Kay’s Website
_________
SUMMARY
A love letter to Brown, Queer, and Trans futures, Kay Ulanday Barrett’s More Than Organs questions “whatever wholeness means” for bodies always in transit, for the safeties and dangers they silo. These poems remix people of color as earthbenders, replay “the choreography of loss” after the 2015 Pulse shooting, and till joy from the cosmic sweetness of a family’s culinary history. Barrett works “to build / a shelter // of / everyone / [they] meet,” from aunties to the legendary Princess Urduja to their favorite air sign. More Than Organs tattoos grief across the knuckles of its left hand and love across the knuckles of its right, leaving the reader physically changed by the intensity of experience, longing, strength, desire, and the need, above all else, to survive. FOR MORE PRAISE GO HERE
“I am so excited for this book, More Than Organs, by Kay Ulanday Barrett, a self-described queer brown Filipinx disabled transgender boi. In observation they are also a poet who through years of work is stepping into the peak of their powers. This well-crafted, necessary, and moving book of poetry is about hunger that is physical, spiritual, and queer. It is also a book that names, makes visible, and feeds those who’ve been erased, made voiceless, misgendered, colonized, and experienced various forms of violence. The poems in this collection are shaped into a song of survival and love. I was struck, too, by the poem dedicated to the victims of Orlando: ‘there were boys holding hands with other boys for the first time.’ Reading Kay’s work, I am reminded of the pioneering and important work of Pat Parker, wry, full of longing, grief, humor, and rage.”
-Pamela Sneed, author of Funeral Diva and Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery“Kay Ulanday Barrett’s More Than Organs journeys between the worlds of memory and the living, acting as a map that leads the reader into the sacred. Charting the space between ‘the kinship of hunger and pain,’ poem after poem refuses the reader rest as the lines grapple with tensions erupting from the queerest art of living. Sometimes joy; sometimes grief. Witness loss, legend, survival, betrayal—all canyons and mesas crafted in the topography of the heart—sear with honesty their testament to chronic pain and endurance against a toxic America. What a gift to drink deep these queer, brown, fiercely resisting poems and to crack open your palette. Reader, follow this fearless, vulnerable speaker into the magic and you will ‘want to lay down / and just / live in it.'”
-Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd’s Son and The Taxidermist’s Cut
Support + Media | More Than Organs
2021 Awarded Stonewall Honor Book for Literature by American Library Association
NOW BOOKING 2022
Who is K.?
Multi-talented Brown Trans Disabled Artist
Highlights 2020
Click here to read the full interview for The Moth- Stonewall 50 By Kay Ulanday Barrett
Featured in The New York Times, Disability Section (2019)
Featured LGBTQ poet to perform at the U.N. for first Global LGBTQ+ Summit, Beyond Binaries (2019)
Them.+ Conde Nast Queeroes Honoree in Literature (2019)
9 Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Writers You Should Know in VOGUE Magazine (2019)
MORE WORK INCLUDING:
While looking at photo albums featured in Academy of American Poets (2019)
curated by TC Tolbert
FEATURED IN:
APOGEE: FEELING OUR POSSIBLE VOLUMES: Jenni(f)fer Tamayo interviews Kay Ulanday Barrett
AAWW on The Margins: When The Chant Comes, Two Poems By Kay Ulanday Barrett
AUTO STRADDLE: Dapper Crip: Queercrip Encounters with Fashion and Community
BITCH Magazine: POETIC RESISTANCE AGAINST EVERYDAY TRANSPHOBIA, RACISM, ABLEISM: A REVIEW OF “WHEN THE CHANT COMES”
BLACK GIRL DANGEROUS: Book Review- “When The Chant Comes”
COSMONAUTS AVENUE: Poems By Kay Ulanday Barrett
DAPPER Q: DAPPER CRIP: DISABILITY, QUEER MASCULINITY, AND FASHION
ENTROPY, DINNERVIEW: Dinnerview: Kay Ulanday Barrett
FIELDS MAGAZINE: Issue 11, 2019 – Interview + 3 Poems: Kay Ulanday Barrett
LAMBDA LITERARY: Kay Ulanday Barrett: On Dancing it Out, Revising Masculinity, and Poetry as Testimony
LAMBDA LITERARY: Queer Filipinx/Pilipinx Poetics: Celebrating Filipino American History Month by Kay Ulanday Barrett
PLATYPUS PRESS: Read Fives Interview
TAYO Magazine: Four Poems By Kay Ulanday Barrett
WINTER TANGERINE: Book Review- When The Chant Comes, Kay Ulanday Barrett
VIDA REVIEW: Poetry as Offering: To Practice in Poetry and Live in the Body-mind
“I believe that Kay is an artist of merit. Kay is all heart. All in… We need Kay’s stories, Kay’s stellar art, Kay’s warrior vision.”
— Sharon Bridgforth – Author of love conjure/blues, the Lambda Literary Award winning, the bull-jean stories, RedBone Press; and co-editor of Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project
Short Bio
KAY ULANDAY BARRETT is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, a winner of the 2022 Next Book Residency with Tin House, a James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell, and most recently in 2023, residencies at Baldwin for the Arts and Millay Arts awarded by Lambda Literary. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They have featured at The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, The Hemispheric Institute, The Whitney, The MoMA, Symphony Space, The Ford Foundation, Brooklyn Museum, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Manchester PRIDE, Sesame Street, & more. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Colorlines, Literary Hub, The Advocate, Poetry Unbound, Split This Rock, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, The Lily, and elsewhere. For more info: kaybarrett.net & @Brownroundboi on social media.
Long Bio
A 2021 Lambda Literary Finalist, 2021 Stonewall Award Honor Book author, and Winner of the 2022 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry by the Foundation of Contemporary Arts., Kay Ulanday Barrett aka @brownroundboi, is a poet, performer, and educator, navigating life as a disabled Filipinx-amerikan transgender queer in the U.S. with struggle, resistance, and laughter. They have received fellowships from Tin House, MacDowell, The Home School, Drunken Boat, VONA Voices, and The Lambda Literary Review. K. has featured on colleges & stages globally; The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Museum, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia University, Northwestern, The School of the Art Institute, to name a few. K’s bold work continues to excite and challenge audiences. K. has facilitated workshops, presented keynotes, and contributed to panels with various social justice communities. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Bitch Media, Colorlines, Asian American Literary Review, Al Jazeera English, Poetry Magazine, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, Frontier Poetry, RaceForward, The Advocate, Bitch Magazine, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, PBS NewsHour, & more. Recent publications include contributions in the anthologies, Q&A: Queer & Asian in North America (Temple University), Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter), Subject To Change (Sibling Rivalry Press), Outside the XY: Queer Black & Brown Masculinity (Magnus Books), and Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices (Trans-genre Press). When The Chant Comes (Topside Press, 2016) is their first collection and More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) is their second collection of poetry. Check out their work at kaybarrett.net
Areas of interest
Movement Building, Cultural Work, Cultural Strategy, Community Art & Performance; Disabled Poetics & Art; Race, Gender, Class, Sexuality, and Disability; Disability Justice; Asian American Culture; Filipinx culture; Mixed Race issues; Queer & Transgender Justice; Critical Food Issues; Intersectionality; Poor, Working Class, & formerly homeless/Houseless perspectives; politics of Food & Culture.
RECENT MEDIA
Video
Poets House Presents: Kay Ulanday Barrett
July 2020 | More Than Organs, Jersey City, NJ.
Featured on bklyn boihood x Collective Sex (New Women’s Center, Brooklyn NY. | 2018)
LIVE Performance: You are SO BRAVE,
Asian American Writers’ Workshop 2015.
Upcoming Events
WEDNESDAY 9/7
Trans Justice Funding Project –
Alumni
TUESDAY 10/4
Roots, Wounds, Words
Craft Talk
THURSDAY 10/20
Dodge Poetry Foundation + Lambda
Feature + Panel
THURSDAY 10/22
Burton Blatt Institute + Syracuse
University – Disability Poetic Series
SUNDAY 10/25
NCTE – 2022 Trans Survey
WED 11/9-WED 12/14
Tin House Residency
FRI 12/9
Tin House Winter Reading
MON 12/19
The MoMA + AAWW
Writing Club Session
TUES 12/20
Asian American Writer’s Workshop
M2M Showcase
3/24 THURSDAY • AWP
1:30pm EST- 3:00pm EST
AWP Featured event “Since My Body:
Discovery and Embodiment of Disabled Voices”
3/25 FRIDAY • AWP
12:10 PM–1:10 PM ET
Crip Time in Pandemic Times
#AWP22 Virtual Conference Platform
4/9 SAT
Wider Than the Sky Youth Poetry Festival
4/16 SAT
1pm-3pm MT
Asian American Studies Assoc.
Round table PANEL
4/20 WED
BRENT INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL, MANILA
Mamplasan, Binan Laguna
1230am EST/ 1230pm PHL
4/22 FRI
Macondo Writers Workshop
Celebrates National Poetry Month
6:30pm CT
4/25 MON
Illiff School of Theology
7:30pm EST
4/27 WED
Asian American Writer’s Workshop
More Than Organs:
Asian Queer Showcase
7pm EST
5/11 WED
Zoeglossia Faculty Workshop
5/19-5/22 THURS-SUN
Greensboro Bound
Literary Festival
9/28 -Southern California Grant Makers Gala
10/7 – Beyond Binaries Conference @ UIC
10/14 – San Diego Community College
10/16 – Sick Concert w/ Bilen Berhanu
10/17 – Q&A anthology w/ Wo Chan
10/20 – AAWW Lunch Poetry & Community
10/21 – Libromobile
10/26 – Mouth to Mouth Showcase
Asian American Writer’s Workshop
10/28 – The Wallace Foundation, Artist Salon
10/29 – Columbia University
11/5 – CSU Stanislaus State
11/16 – Ford Foundation, Artist Spotlight
11/18 – Books are Magic + Pamela Sneed
1/26 University of Colorado
2/17 Break Beat Poets + Lineage of Rain
2/19 Reed College
2/24 Mouth to Mouth
3/11 DePaul University
3/9 UCLA
3/26 UNC Queer Studies Conference
3/31 CSU
4/1 CSU (workshop)
4/7 Butte College
4/15 Williams
4/25 UCSB
*5/2021 U of Wisconsin
10/22 Ball State University (keynote)
10/24 peace is loud, IG takeover
10/24 Boston Book Festival
10/28 Asian American Writer’s Workshop
10/29 Women & kids first
11/14 Shattering Binaries (keynote)
12/6 Asian American Writer’s Workshop
12/10 LexPRIDE (keynote)
Store
Praise
“Kay’s command of craft, commitment to truth and dedication to art as service is to be commended. I believe that Kay is an artist of merit. Kay is all heart. All in. We need Kay’s stories, Kay’s stellar art, Kay’s warrior vision.”
– Sharon Bridgforth, Author of love conjure/blues and the Lambda Literary Award winning, the bull-jean stories
“These poems are songs–aching, beautiful, necessary songs that transport and transform.”
– Eli Clare, Author of Exile and Pride and Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure
“These poems are embodied, thick and fluid. Read them with your body and spirit on notice.”
– Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity and M Archive: After the End of the World
UNIVERSITIES
Kay’s work is impressive and any chance you get to witness their spoken word or contribute in a workshop shouldn’t be missed!
— Fleurette King
Director, The Rainbow Center
University of Connecticut
K’s keynote was phenomenal. Through sharing with us their multifaceted experience, K’s presence had a tremendous impact and helped to cement the shift towards a theme of greater intersectionality.
— Tzu Yung Huang
Head Organizer, Ivy Q Conference
Princeton University
Kay’s presentation at our college was both enlightening and educational. My students expressed a genuine appreciation for Kay’s passion, poetry and honesty.
— Vivek Shreya
Professor, George Brown College
Kay’s creative writing and performance workshop loosened the memories we carry in our bodies, made us aware of the politics we display on our faces, and excavated the truth in our language
— Gender & Women’s Studies Program
Pace University
Kay Ulanday Barrett kicked off our school year right with a night of unapologetically badass poetry. Kay spits truth with passion and fire, breaking down topics such as oppression, gender, disability, intersectionality, masculinity, the diaspora, and home.
— Disability Center
University of Washington
CREATING CONNECTIONS
SEEKING LIBERATION
FINGER ON THE PULSE
What K. Tweets
K. on Twitter
brown out shouts!
Poetry View Projectsince my body
Poetry View ProjectEverything down at your feet
Poetry View ProjectPsalm for a womon at age 60
Poetry View Projectsong for the kicked out
Poetry View Project-
“Kay’s command of craft, commitment to truth and dedication to art as service is to be commended. I believe that Kay is an artist of merit. Kay is all heart. All in… We need Kay’s stories, Kay’s stellar art, Kay’s warrior vision.”Sharon Bridgforth – Author of love conjure/blues, the Lambda Literary Award winning, the bull-jean stories, RedBone Press; and co-editor of Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project
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“We deeply need disabled queer of color writers to be writing and performing our lives, and do not have nearly enough of our voices writing and publishing in the world. Kay’s work fills a much needed void.”Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha – 2012 Lambda Award winning Love Cake, Consensual Genocide, and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. I am the co founder and co director of Mangos With Chili.
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“I was immediately blown away by Kay’s ability to break down complex issues in a such an accessible, powerful, and artistic vernacular.
Regardless of the audience or space, Kay has an ability to open people’s hearts and ears…” Mia Nakano – Director of the Visibility Project, a founder of Hyphen magazine & a board member of the Queer Cultural Center.
Scheduled Events
BOOKING
Is your university working on People of Color survival?
Are you exhausted of white or rich guh-ayyy events?
Do you want brown and poor sass, transgender tenacity,
and some sick knowledge on disability justice? Now booking
for events, workshops, performances, and more this
Spring & Fall 2022. Priority will be given to collaborations
that center QT/BIPOC and sick & disabled community! Book now
to reserve your workshop, keynote, & wobbly swerve.
For more info/inquiries, go here.
All donations will go to the following:
- basic costs of medical needs including medication, pain management, long-awaited surgeries
- medical tools/aids
- basic living expenses
SUPPORT K.
Can’t book me but want to support my work?
Feel free to donate to a BROWN ROUND WOBBLY BOI HUSTLE!
You can send some kindness my way via donation for my basic livelihood are appreciated.
If you can guess, being transgender, disabled, brown, and poor cultural critic/worker isn’t a lucrative career. My work does incite ways that navigate some hope.
If you live this life similarly, you know access, resources, and daily sustenance aren’t a game. Being sick/chronically-ill/disabled in this big ableist gender-binary world has some (systemic) struggle!
Any donations you can donate via my PayPal by clicking this guy:
If you donate more than $100, you’ll get an upcoming SPRUNG 2021 PACKAGE, that includes postcards, stickers, & other goodies!