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.

AWARDS + RECOGNITION

• 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