Author of love conjure/blues and the Lambda Literary Award winning, the bull-jean stories; a 2023 United States Artists Fellow,  2022 Winner of Yale’s Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, and a 2022-2024 McKnight National Fellow.

SHORT BIO

KAY ULANDAY BARRETT (he/they) 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.



LONG BIO

A 2024 Disabled Futures Fellow awarded by The Ford Foundation + The Mellon Foundation and United States Artists, Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry by The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell.

They are the author of poetry collection When The Chant Comes (Topside Press, 2016). 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 offered fellowships from Tin House, Millay Arts, MacDowell as a 2020 James Baldwin Fellow, VONA Voices, Monson Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Macondo, and The Lambda Literary Review. They have featured at The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, The Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), University of the Arts London, The Hemispheric Institute, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Museum, Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Dodge Poetry Festival, The Allied Media Conference, Boston Book Festival, The Poetry Foundation, Duke University, Georgetown University, UPenn, Burton Blatt Institute, UCLA, UC Berkeley, University of North Carolina, Northwestern University, Princeton, Columbia University, The School of the Arts Institute, The New School, NYU, Manchester PRIDE, Sesame Street, & more.

Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Bitch Media, Academy of American Poets, Colorlines, Asian American Literary Review, The Advocate, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, Yahoo News, PBS News Hour, The Rumpus, The Hopkins Review, Poetry Unbound, Glass Poetry, The Lily, VIDA Review, The Maine Review, them., The Massachusetts Review, Autostraddle, Disability Arts, Foglifter, Zoeglossia, Fields Magazine, (F)riction, Plenitude, Split This Rock, Bellingham Review, The Indiana Review, Tayo Magazine, 3Elements, The Reader, Learning for Justice, The Body is Not an Apology, Forward Together, The Margins, The Deaf Poets Society, POOR Magazine, Disability Visibility Project,  APOGEE, Electric Literature, and Frontier Poetry. His anthology contributions include: We Gathered Heat (Haymarket, 2024), Home is Where You Queer Your Heart Anthology (Fog Lifter, 2021), Q&A: Queer & Asian in North America (2020), Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart (2020), Shades of Noir (2020), Graffiti (2019), Subject To Change (2017), Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (2017), The Trans List (2016), and Outside the XY: Queer Black & Brown Masculinity (2016), among others.

For over a decade, they have served as a curator at The Asian American Writer’s Workshop for the Mouth-to-Mouth Showcase. They currently attempt to remix their mama’s recipes and live in New Jersey with their gorgeous partner and jowly dog. For more information go to kaybarrett.net and @brownroundboi on social media.

  • Awarded 2024 Disabled Futures Fellowship, Ford Foundation + Mellon Foundation + United States Artists
  • Awarded 2024 Baldwin for the Arts Fellowship
  • Awarded 2023 Artist in Res for Millay Arts selected by Lambda Literary
  • Awarded 2022 Artist in Residency by Tin House
  • Awarded a James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell
  • Awarded 10 Most Read Poems of 2023 by Split This Rock
  • Awarded 2022 The Cy Twombly Poetry Award from The Foundation
  • of Contemporary Arts
  • Named Bookriot’s 10 2SLGBTQ+ DISABLED AUTHORS TO READ
  • Awarded 2021 Lambda Literary Finalist Award for Transgender Poetry
  • Awarded 2021 Stonewall Honor Book for Literature by American Library Association

Books

2020

More Than Organs

Sibling Rivalry Press

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.

2016

When the Chant Comes

Topside Heliotrope

Kay Ulanday Barrett has been bringing his unique poetry to audiences for over a decade, unpicking vital political questions around race, sickness and disability and gender, and chronicling the everydayness of life in the U.S. Empire with humor, poignancy and inimitable vitality. Now at last a generous selection of his work will be available in print. Each of these poems is a brilliant little story. Taken together, they show a master craftsman at the top of their game.

News & Updates

  • [July 13, 2024] NY Poetry Festival + Sibling Rivalry Press

    [July 13, 2024] NY Poetry Festival + Sibling Rivalry Press

    Hey all, Summer poetry outdoors, yes?!— join me SATURDAY 7/13…

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  • [June 25, 2024] Celebrating PRIDE with Asian American Writer’s Workshop

    [June 25, 2024] Celebrating PRIDE with Asian American Writer’s Workshop

    TUESDAY, June 25, 20247pm ETVIRTUAL Loves & friends,Need a virtual…

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  • [April 17, 2024] NYC Public Library World Literature Festival

    [April 17, 2024] NYC Public Library World Literature Festival

    April 17, 2024, WEDNESDAY New York Public Library, World Literature…

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