The Inspired Word performance series is excited to present a new event that will become a regular part of our calendar, Queer Apple: NYC GLBT Life in Poetry & Prose, featuring some of this city's best GLBT writers/performers - Sinclair Sexsmith, Christa Orth, Ocean Vuong, Samantha Barrow, Kestryl Cael Lowery, Kelli Dunham, Brandon Lacy Campos, and Jessica Halem.

In addition, there will be a 12-slot open mic (4 minutes each slot) to bring your own GLBT experience to the party. Must be GLBT themed.

A night of transcendence of words through narrative, poetry, and humor. A celebration of queer culture.

Hosted by Aimee Herman.

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When: Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2012

Where: 116 (formerly The Gaslight Cafe)
116 MacDougal Street
(between Bleecker Street and Minetta Lane)
Downstairs Lounge
Manhattan, NY 10012
(212) 254-9996
(917) 703-1512

By subway, take the A, B, C, D, E, F to West 4th Street-Washington Square.

Doors open for sign-up @ 6:30pm

Show starts @ 7pm

Cover Charge: $10

BIOS:

Aimee Herman, a queer performative poet, has been featured at various New York venues such as the Happy Ending Lounge, Dixon Place, Wow Café Theatre, Public Assembly, and Sidewalk Café. She has performed at reading/performance series such as: In the Flesh erotic salon, Hyper Gender, Sideshow: Queer Literary Carnival, and Red Umbrella Diaries. Her poetry can be found in Clean Sheets, Cliterature Journal, InStereo Press, and/or journal, and Polari Journal. She can also be read in hell strung and crooked (Uphook Press), Best Women’s Erotica 2010 (Cleis Press), Best Lesbian Love Stories 2010 (Alyson Books), Nice Girls, Naughty Sex (Seal), and the upcoming Women in Lust (Cleis). She currently works as an erotica editor for Oysters & Chocolate. She can be found writing poems on her body in Brooklyn. Find her at http://aimeeherman.wordpress.com/.

Samantha Barrow is a poet, performer, writer and educator. She earned her MS in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, where she was awarded a Distinguished Graduate Research Scholar Fellowship.  She completed the Advanced Seminar at the International Trauma Studies Program in NYC to fortify her work writing with and advocating for survivors of sexual assault, and now teaches Narrative Medicine at the City College of New York. She’s been known to ride her motorcycle around the country, sharing her poems in bars, universities, libraries, and cafes. She has received multiple grants from the Leeway Foundation to tour and to facilitate Sound/Body/Love/Poem; gently erotic poetry workshops for survivors of sexual abuse, and currently facilitates Moving Our Embodied Stories: Creative Resilience Workshops with survivors of Sexual Abuse with Saliha Bava, PhD. For more info, please visit http://www.samanthabarrow.com/.

Kestryl Cael Lowrey is a dandy trans butch performance artist with too many stories to tell.   Kestryl Cael has appeared at conferences, colleges, festivals, and local theatres across North America . Whether on-stage or behind a podium, ze considers it hir artistic duty to engage hir audiences in provocative dialogue without letting them take hir (or themselves) too seriously. Ze was a member of “The Language of Paradox,” a performance ensemble founded and directed by Kate Bornstein. Cael’s writing appears in anthologies such as Kicked Out, and ze is half of the performance duo, PoMo Freakshow. Kestryl’s full-length performances include XY(T), 348, and RADCLYFFE: The Completely Honest and Mostly True Story of Victorian England's Second Most Notorious Invert.  Ze regularly tours to colleges and universities to perform, teach workshops, and talk to students and staff about gender, sexuality, mental health, and social justice. Kestryl holds a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre and Anthropology at Lewis & Clark College, and a Master’s in Performance Studies at New York University. Ze lives in Brooklyn, New York with hir partner, two puddle-shaped cats, and two canines of dramatically different sizes.

Called “Brave and Bawdy” by Time Out Chicago and “Righteous and Chipper” by the Times-Picayune, Jessica Halem was raised by hippie Jewish artists from the East Coast which was anything but normal – or easy – in small-town Ohio, but did help to foster this very funny “on-your-face” comic who puts her queer spin on everything from Sudafed to Feminism to Glory Holes. She was trained in femme queerness at Sarah Lawrence College; earned her chops as a social justice activist working for Bella Abzug; and as a LGBTQ health guru running the Lesbian Community Cancer Project. Halem performs at every college, Pride, and bathhouse where she can help find the funny in even the toughest of times.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is the author of the chapbook BURNINGS (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010) and is currently an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He was a semi-finalist for the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and has received an Academy of American Poets award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations. Poems appear in RHINO, diode, Lantern Review, Softblow, Crate, and PANK, among others. He keeps a blog at http://www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com/.

Sinclair Sexsmith (http://www.mrsexsmith.com/) runs the award-winning project Sugarbutch Chronicles at http://www.sugarbutch.net/. Her work appears in the Best Lesbian Erotica series, Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, and Take Me There: Transgender and Genderqueer Erotica, among others. She is the editor of Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica (Cleis Press 2012).

Christa Orth is a fifth-generation Pacific Northwesterner, and a creative nonfiction writer based in Brooklyn. She's writing her first book: stories of the queer history of Seattle and Portland. Christa on the board of MIX NYC, writes for the ACT UP Oral History Project, and is a proud Lambda Literary Fellow. Christa's publications include a contribution to the Lambda Award winning anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City.

Brandon Lacy Campos is a 34 year old Afro-Boricua, African-American, Ojibwe, Euro, poz, writer, blogger, performance poet, policy wonk, organizer, and rabble rouser. His work has appeared in nearly a dozen anthologies ranging from collections of queer Latino poetry to Queer Twin Cities, an academic anthology exploring the queer history of Minneapolis and St. Paul. He has written articles for numerous online and print magazines and newspapers including Gay.com and The Advocate. His blog, MyFeetOnlyWalkForward.com earned him the #2 spot on Queer Latino Bloggers to Watch at MyLatinoVoice.com, and he also blogs at TheBody.com. In 2006, the Minneapolis Star Tribune named him a “Young Wonk to Watch,” for his insane love of breaking down complex public policy issues into language non-Wonks can understand. In addition, Brandon has guest lectured at half a dozen colleges and universities on the intersection of race, sexual orientation and art as a tool for social change. He recently performed Off Broadway as the opening act for Bebe Zahara Benet's Queendom. He is a proud NOC (Nerd of Color), and combines his love of sex, politics, love, science fiction and fantasy, and queerness in his writing. He is the author of the collection of poetry, from Rebel Satori Press, It Ain't Truth If It Doesn't Hurt. His first novel, Eden Lost, will be available in 2012, also from Rebel Satori Press. Brandon lives in Hell's Kitchen with his former partner and artistic collaborator, David Berube, and his dog Mimzy.

Kelli Dunham is the winner of the 2007 Fresh Fruit Festival Award of Distinction for stand up comedy, although she has never before or since been called distinguished. She has performed nationwide at LGBT pride events (Seattle, Long Beach CA, Rhode Island, Baltimore, Atlanta), colleges (University of Delaware, Penn State University, Smith College, Temple University, Colorado State University) and even the occasional livestock auction. Both her comedy CDs, “I am NOT a 12 Year Old Boy” and “Almost Pretty” are on regular rotation on Sirius Satellite Radio's mainstream comedy station and she has appeared on Showtime and the Discovery Network. She is the co-founder and co-producer of Queer Memoir, the popular NYC based storytelling event and the author of four books, including two health books for pre-teens which were, strangely enough, selected to be used by the Sonlight Christian Schools Homeschooling Curriculum as part of their science and wellness program.

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Produced by Mike Geffner Presents The Inspired Word

http://inspiredwordnyc.blogspot.com/

"The Inspired Word isn't just a series, it's a movement."