#qtpoc literature

[perfectlyripeclementine]

Dirty River, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, carrying only two backpacks, caught a Greyhound bus in America and ran away to Canada. They ended up in Toronto, where they were welcomed by a community of queer punks of colour offering promises of love and revolution, yet they remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate, riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it is an intensely personal road map and an intersectional, tragicomic tale that reveals how a disabled queer woman of colour and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the not-so-distant past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams their way home."

just gonna put this here for when i’ve finished a couple of the books i bought recently and am looking for queer literature…

[niaking]

My books are on sale for pride season. Usually $20 each, you can get all three volumes of Queer & Trans Artists of Color for only $50 (and free shipping) until the end of June. These books include interviews with Janet Mock, Julio Salgado, Vivek Shraya and more! Get the discount here. Full listing of interviewees below the break.

VOLUME ONE (2014) ​CO-EDITED BY TERRA MIKALSON & JESSICA GLENNON-ZUKOFF

Mixed-race queer art activist Nia King left a full-time job in an effort to center her life around making art. Grappling with questions of purpose, survival, and compromise, she started a podcast called We Want the Airwaves in order to pick the brains of fellow queer and trans artists of color about their work, their lives, and “making it” - both in terms of success and in terms of survival.

In this collection of interviews, Nia discusses fat burlesque with MAGNOLIAH BLACK, queer fashion with KIAM MARCELO JUNIO, interning at Playboy with JANET MOCK, dating gay Latino Republicans with JULIO SALGADO, intellectual hazing with KORTNEY RYAN ZIEGLER, gay gentrification with VAN BINFA, getting a book deal with VIRGIE TOVAR, the politics of black drag with MICIA MOSELY, evading deportation with YOSIMAR REYES, weird science with RYKA AOKI, gay public sex in Africa with NICK MWALUKO, thin privilege with FABIAN ROMERO, the tyranny of “self-care” with LOVEMME CORAZ��N, “selling out” with MISS PERSIA and DADDIE$ PLA$TIK, the self-employed art-activist hustle with LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA, and much, much more. Buy book one here.

VOLUME TWO (2016) ​CO-EDITED BY ELENA ROSE

Building on the groundbreaking first volume, Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives, Nia King is back with a second archive of interviews from her podcast We Want the Airwaves. She maintains her signature frankness as an interviewer while seeking advice on surviving capitalism from creative folks who often find their labor devalued.

In this collection of interviews, Nia discusses biphobia in gay men’s communities with JUBA KALAMKA, helping border-crossers find water in the desert with MICHA CÁRDENAS, trying to preserve Indigenous languages through painting with GRACE ROSARIO PERKINS, revolutionary monster stories with ELENA ROSE, using textiles to protest police violence with INDIRA ALLEGRA, trying to respectfully reclaim one’s own culture with AMIR RABIYAH, taking on punk racism with MIMI THI NGUYEN, the imminent trans women of color world takeover with LEXI ADSIT, queer life in WWII Japanese American incarceration camps with TINA TAKEMOTO, hip-hop and Black Nationalism with AJUAN MANCE, making music in exile with MARTÍN SORRONDEGUY, issue-based versus identity-based organizing with TRISH SALAH, ten years of curating and touring with the QTPOC arts organization Mangos With Chili with CHERRY GALETTE, raising awareness about gentrification through games with MATTIE BRICE, self-publishing versus working with a small press with VIVEK SHREYA, and the colonial nature of journalism school with KILEY MAY. The conversation continues. Buy book two here.

VOLUME THREE (2019) ​CO-EDITED BY MALIHA AHMED

Is it possible to make art and make rent without compromising your values? Nia King set out to answer this question when she started We Want the Airwaves podcast in 2013. In her Queer & Trans Artists of Color book series, Nia collects podcast interviews — with Black, Latinx, Asian, Middle Eastern and Indigenous LGBTQ writers, musicians and visual artists — which feature both incredible storytelling and practical advice.

In the latest installment of the Queer & Trans Artists of Color series, Nia discusses performing at the White House with VENUS SELENITE, the global nature of colorism with KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE, writing for Marvel Comics with GABBY RIVERA, using lies to tell unspeakable truths with KAI CHENG THOM, Black mental health with ANTHONY J. WILLIAMS, curating diverse anthologies with JOAMETTE GIL, growing up trans in rural Idaho with MEY RUDE, covering crime as a baby-faced reporter with SAM LEVIN, feminist approaches to journalism with SARAH LUBY BURKE, documenting Black punk history with OSA ATOE, crossing color lines with QWO-LI DRISKILL, fat hairy brown goddesses with PARADISE KHANMALEK, the usefulness of anger with JIA QING WILSON-YANG, transitioning as death and rebirth with ARIELLE TWIST, surviving homelessness and touring the world with STAR AMERASU and much, much more. Buy book three here.

[tootiredtobepoetic]

“When you are marginalized, the lesson you encounter, endlessly and relentlessly, is that you have no value. The calculus of what is good art and bad art is a calculus of what is valuable. The way in which sex workers and substance users and poor people and queer people and colonized people and trans people and queer people who are not participating in an economy of a certain kind of value, the way in which our speech and realities exist, is under persistent erasure. Like the folks at Topside Press point out, the space in which we’re most valued is when we speak to a cis audience as if we are the only trans person in the world and trans people are monolithic. If you are the one Black friend, you get to have certain value in a way that does violence to you. I value cultural conversations. I value the way in which the aesthetic allows us to make our lives livable and more than livable; desirable and interesting for ourselves.”

-Trish Salah, Queer and Trans Artists of Color Vol.2

[foreverthesoniag]

🌈✨A big shout outs to the #Queer #Trans #nonbinary #undocumented #migrants who made this anthology possible! It was important for me to make sure that #qtpoc #undocumented voices were front and center in this anthology. Even among our #migrant communities our work is often erased or minimized. It was #undocumented #queer #trans community organizers and #artists that led our movement work. Think back in 2010 where a radical shift happen in migrant discourse , in organizing art and policy spaces , and direct action work —- that was #undocuqueer folks!! “undocumented unafraid and unapologetic” was brought to you by us queer folks in the space!! I know during #pridemonth we are lifted, but I hope our work continues to be lifted, cited, celebrated beyond June. To my beloved Queer Trans Non-binary contributors- thank you for your tremendous work, vision, intentional frameworks and analysis, and everything that you bring to this world!! I consider you part of my extended family! To my beloved chosen fam: Rommyyy123 @l_arely Lylliam, @juliosalgado83 @alexa_lapintora thank you for years of friendship and love!! Life has been possible because of you!! I can’t wait for folks to read and see your work in bookstore stands and across the country! Thank you to all our Queer Trans migrant community who showed up yesterday to support. What a reunion!! Thank you always!! Make sure to go grab your copy tomorrow June 7th when book officially is in stores!! [ Ps: I love my prom photo with @rommyyy123 . Thank you @siempretupapi for capturing!] #migration #lgbt #lgbtq #papifemme #art #literature #book (at The Mistake Room) https://www.instagram.com/p/CeeebQzvZo3/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[thesophiewhit]

Someone saw my writing and went: “I don’t read for gay and trans rep. I read for BELIEVABLE CHARACTERS”.

Oop. I’m sorry. We do exist though babe. Believe it. And I’ll keep writing about us.

Bye y’all. From now on, I identify as -fictional- with an absolutely magical character arc byeeeee ✨✨

[kamalamackerel]

i decided to call these my pink moon portrait series 🌸 🌕 🌸 🌕 🌸 🌕 🌸 ⠀ ⠀ photo credit: @laurencephilomene⠀ ⠀ #blessed #gratitude #headshot #portrait #qtbipoc #qtpoc #femme #trans #transgender #gay #lgbt #queer #artist #performer #writer #poet #visualartist #art #performance #literature #poetry #textileartist #queermtl #mtlart #mauritius #montreal #transmontreal #lamackerel #kamalamackerel (at Montreal, Quebec) https://www.instagram.com/p/B-xFJyyAkun/?igshid=1wwav3mnqlakd

[escapedartgeek]

➢ get to know the mun

name: rumi nickname / s: otherwise known as kyrian, tomie height: 5′2 nationality: living in the US. favourite fruit: banana, pineapple favourite season: autumn and spring - transitional seasons are my vibe favourite scents: freshly baked goods, and maybe some herbal things. favourite animals: ..i think ravens are cool tea, coffee, hot cocoa: tea and then hot cocoa. I used to be more of a hot cocoa person but the milk in it is starting to mess with me so I can’t drink it as much. .-. average hours of sleep: 6-8 hrs when my blog was created: originally created in 2015 - wrote until..2017-2018. took a break and rebooted later in 2018 # of followers: 568 random fact: i like making random sounds on my synth, and i write a lot about info justice favourite food: noodles, seafood, baked goods favourite t.v. shows: twilight zone, tales from the crypt favourite movie: hmmm, i’ll say ganja and hess sexuality: bi - grey ace pronouns: they/them or xe/xer favourite book series: there’s this trilogy on the philosophy of horror from verso books that i love and should revisit soon actually. favourite video game / s: usually some random art game i get into for a while. favourite subject: literature, art history, it guys or girls: ...I refuse to engage with this because I don’t rock with the binary at all.So maybe other folks who don’t fuck with the binary. what I should be doing: not sure anymore. life has ..taken a weird turn. favourite fandoms: I don’t really have a favorite fandom anymore. I just like seeing weird horror folks who are qtpoc and miscellaneous interesting stuff from original characters. I’m also weirdly into mythology but.. that’s for another muse.

➢ tagged by: @salemsaberhxgen ➢ tagging: you.

[afromanblac-blog]

GET INTO AFRO’MAN BLAC - the young jiggy brotha for the folk

Afro’Man is a young Black man of trans/queer experience. he is the author of ​lilium: celebratory prose poetry for the Black trans woman. he is the host of the upcoming web series podcast ​JIVE. 

a blogger, essayist, writer & poet, liberationist, creator, freethinker, graphic designer, and developing community organizer, he seeks to explore, expand, reinvent, and redefine. 

COMING SOON: 

JIVE - unplug from whiteciety with soul space and cold space, broadcasting all things Black and revolutionary, hosted by Afro’Man Blac.

SUBSCRIBE TO UPDATES: facebook become a patron of my arts and media soundcloud instagram: afromanblac

LITERATURE.AFROMANBLAC.NET

[morethanafinalgirl]

Jada Anderson

Afrofuturism Blog Post #1

4.19.19

Janelle Monáe and Dirty Computer: Black Excellence Queering Space

What I love about Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer Emotion Picture—and about Janelle Monáe as an artist—is that she unapologetically puts Blackness and Queerness on full display. And never confines them to these rigid definitions of what Blackness and Queerness are. Not only is she able to represent a community that is often distinctly separate from LGBTQ communities—Queer and Trans People of Color or QTPOC—she is able to challenge the ways audiences think about what it is to be Black, Queer, and Black and Queer. To me they have always gone hand in hand, especially considering that before it was reclaimed by marginalized communities, Queer held—and still holds—a basic definition of ‘strange / odd.’  But even more importantly to me, as a verb it has always meant “spoil or ruin.” In this sense, Black people have been framed externally as queering space since we have been around, seen as threats because of our difference. However to ourselves, our queering of space has been to disrupt a status quo that was exclusionary, harmful, and lacking movement.  Our “spoiling” of spaces looks like creation, innovation, originality—out of both hardship and inspiration, introducing concepts and enacting them in ways people had and have never seen before. Dirty Computer is a perfect example of queering space. It’s ability to disrupt constructed norms of pop music, and to transcend multiple genres, has a real ability to both make people uncomfortable and to create change. Janelle Monae deals with concept of this queerness of us being stripped away from us, & framed as “cleansing”. Our memories of our storied pasts which have allowed us to create our future have to get wiped away to prevent us from further disrupting the status quo. But in the end, we see how this “cleansing” is not strong enough to keep us silent or to keep us from persisting.

Admittedly I was annoyed when Dirty Computer did not receive a Grammy. Shook but not surprised that excellence was once again improperly recognized. The idea of Dirty Computer being “too ahead of its time” is not an unfamiliar critique to Black women’s art, whether in music, literature, or in other pockets of society. Those with the most power / ability to make decisions around what is deemed award-worthy have never quite seemed to understand what Black artists are accomplishing, what they are saying or trying to point out. Black people have always been ‘ahead of’ our time. We have had to exist in the future, out of the necessity to envision a better one for ourselves and out of our motivation to create new spaces for us to thrive. “Dirty computers” we may be, and as dirty computers we shall thrive.

[sfsucw]

Radar is hiring!

Please email resume and cover letter to info@radarproductions.org

Details Job Title: Managing Director Status:  Part-Time 20-25 hours per week Classification: contractor

Position overview RADAR Productions seeks an organized, detail-oriented Managing Director to join our team. The Director’s responsibilities include acting as a member of RADAR’s leadership, develop annual budgets, handle day-to-day financial and human resources operations, support the execution of programming and participate in organizational strategy. The managing director works closely with the executive director to implement RADAR’s four core programs and ensure the financial stability of the organization. Availability to work evenings is required.  The ideal candidate has thorough understanding of QuickBooks and is fluent in all aspects and functions of bookkeeping. Passion for queer literature and creativity is a must.

Principal Responsibilities

Financial

Financial management RADAR’s budget including bookkeeping with Excel and Quickbooks, arranging tax preparations, mailing 1099s, CA Cultural Data Project annual data input, invoicing, and check writing

Create and conduct individual donor campaigns several times per year, raising at least $15,000 annually; co-create multiple fundraising events

In conjunction with grant writing consultant, submit over 25 grant applications per year including Federal, State, City funding and private foundation funding streams; manage all grant contracts including reporting requirements; find new potential funding sources

Booking, budgeting and managing of annual Sister Spit literary tour (two weeks in Spring).

Create and administer all program evaluation tools in line with contracted funding obligations

Represent organization to funders, Board, and other entities

Organize and lead Board meetings, maintain regular communication to Board members

make bank deposits

Fufill invoices and check writing

Organize and attend Quarterly meetings with financial adviser

Maintain RADAR insurance

Maintain checking, paypal, square accounts

Admin

Manage the RADAR e-mail

Manage the digital files & physical files

Upkeep Program Master Spreadsheet

General wordpress website updates

Manage California cultural data report

Maintain e-mail lists

Call and conduct regular meetings with the Artistic Director

Program

Handle logistical planning for all RADAR Programs including:

Hire and supervise web site designer, graphic designers, videographers and other contracted staff and interns

Oversee, create and disseminate or delegate creation for all publicity and press; collect for future use; maintain bank of work samples, publicity examples, and press

Work with Artistic Director to conceptualize and administer organization’s structure and year-round programming

Attend all RADAR events, when possible

Create and send press releases

Run social media

Assist in event conceptualization and curating

Sister Spit Tour

Show Us Your Spines Residency at the SFPL

Visual Arts Collaboration

Up to 2 special projects per year

ABOUT RADAR

Founded in 2003, RADAR Productions is one of the nation’s highest profile literary arts organizations focused on queer and trans people of color (QTPOC). Our presenting, commissioning and touring programs re-imagine what the literary arts can be, stimulate the production of work by QTPOC artists and explore the community-building role played by literature and the arts. Our programs build community and create a platform for innovative, emerging and mid-career queer and trans artists of color whose works challenge mainstream concepts of culture, race, gender, sexuality and class and authentically reflect the experiences of QTPOC.

Throughout its 13-year history RADAR has employed the arts to build and amplify a queer community that creates innovative artistic interventions to culture, meaningful transformation for artists’ lives and life-changing and life-affirming access to the literary arts for our audiences. RADAR has always prioritized an inward-facing method: queer artists dialoguing with queer audiences in hopes of strengthening and affirming community, rather than queer artists representing a monolithic queer experience to straight audiences in hopes of being humanized. As such, RADAR prioritizes artistic process/practice, recognizing that the spirit of experimentation, creativity and “art first” has greater potential for cultural change than the expectation that queer artists consistently be expected to be representational first.

For more info go to: https://www.radarproductions.org/blog/radar-is-hiring

[perfectlyripeclementine]

queer novel masterlist: Palestine edition

Found this list via @evereadssapphic on Instagram.

You Exist Too Much, Zaina Arafat

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: "You exist too much," she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East--from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine--Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings--for love, and a place to call home.

Haifa Fragments, Khulud Khamis

As a designer of jewelry, Maisoon wants an ordinary extraordinary life, which isn't easy for a tradition-defying activist and Palestinian citizen of Israel who refuses to be crushed by the feeling that she is an unwelcome guest in the land of her ancestors. She volunteers for the Machsom Watch, an organization that helps children in the Occupied Territories cross the border to receive medical care. Frustrated by her boyfriend Ziyad and her father, who both want her to get on with life and forget those in the Occupied Territories, she lashes out only to discover her father isn't the man she thought he was. Raised a Christian, in a relationship with a Muslim man and enamored with a Palestinian woman from the Occupied Territories, Maisoon must decide her own path.

A Map Of Home, Randa Jarrar

In this fresh, funny, and fearless debut novel, Randa Jarrar chronicles the coming-of-age of Nidali, one of the most unique and irrepressible narrators in contemporary fiction. Born in 1970s Boston to an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, the rebellious Nidali--whose name is a feminization of the word "struggle"--soon moves to a very different life in Kuwait. There the family leads a mildly eccentric middle-class existence until the Iraqi invasion drives them first to Egypt and then to Texas. This critically acclaimed debut novel is set to capture the hearts of everyone who has ever wondered what their own map of home might look like.

The Skin And Its Girl, Sarah Cypher

In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family's ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis' centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.

Decades later, Betty returns to Aunt Nuha's gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she's ever known, or should she follow her heart and the woman she loves, perpetuating her family's cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt's complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family immigrate to the United States. But, as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity, and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us--and wield even the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.

The Philistine, Leila Marshy

Nadia Eid doesn't know it yet, but she's about to change her life. It's the end of the ‘80s and she hasn’t seen her Palestinian father since he left Montreal years ago to take a job in Egypt, promising to bring her with him. But now she’s twenty-five and he’s missing in action, so she takes matters into her own hands. Booking a short vacation from her boring job and Québecois boyfriend, she calls her father from the Nile Hilton in downtown Cairo. But nothing goes as planned and, stumbling around, Nadia wanders into an art gallery where she meets Manal, a young Egyptian artist who becomes first her guide and then her lover. 

Through this unexpected relationship, Nadia rediscovers her roots, her language, and her ambitions, as her father demonstrates the unavoidable destiny of becoming a Philistine – the Arabic word for Palestinian. With Manal’s career poised to take off and her father’s secret life revealed, the First Intifada erupts across the border.

The Twenty-Ninth Year, Hala Alyan

For Hala Alyan, twenty-nine is a year of transformation and upheaval, a year in which the past--memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith--winds itself around the present.

Hala's ever-shifting, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body. Poems leap from war-torn cities in the Middle East, to an Oklahoma Olive Garden, a Brooklyn brownstone; from alcoholism to recovery; from a single woman to a wife. This collection summons breathtaking chaos, one that seeps into the bones of these odes, the shape of these elegies.

A vivid catalog of heartache, loneliness, love and joy, The Twenty-Ninth Year is an education in looking for home and self in the space between disparate identities.

Between Banat, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali

In Between Banat Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and nonnormative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film. Moving from The Thousand and One Nights and the Golden Era of Egyptian cinema to contemporary novels, autobiographical writing, and prints and graphic novels that imagine queer Arab futures, Shomali uses what she calls queer Arab critique to locate queer desire amid heteronormative imperatives. Showing how systems of heteropatriarchy and Arab nationalisms foreclose queer Arab women's futures, she draws on the transliterated term "banat"--the Arabic word for girls--to refer to women, femmes, and nonbinary people who disrupt stereotypical and Orientalist representations of the "Arab woman." By attending to Arab women's narration of desire and identity, queer Arab critique substantiates queer Arab histories while challenging Orientalist and Arab national paradigms that erase queer subjects. In this way, Shomali frames queerness and Arabness as relational and transnational subject formations and contends that prioritizing transnational collectivity over politics of authenticity, respectability, and inclusion can help lead toward queer freedom.

Belladonna, Anbara Salam

Isabella is beautiful, inscrutable, and popular. Her best friend, Bridget, keeps quietly to the fringes of their Connecticut Catholic school, watching everything and everyone, but most especially Isabella.

In 1957, when the girls graduate, they land coveted spots at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Pentila in northern Italy, a prestigious art history school on the grounds of a silent convent. There, free of her claustrophobic home and the town that will always see her and her Egyptian mother as outsiders, Bridget discovers she can reinvent herself as anyone she desires... perhaps even someone Isabella could desire in return.

But as that glittering year goes on, Bridget begins to suspect Isabella is keeping a secret from her, one that will change the course of their lives forever. (I believe this book is by a Palestinian author but not actually set in or about Palestine.)

[niaking]

New podcast episode, featuring Sonora Reyes, author of The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School!

Growing up, reading and writing were things that made Sonora Reyes feel "dumb" in school. So how did they get from there to writing the Lamba Literary Award-winning, National Book Award-nominated Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School? In this interview, Sonora discusses healing their relationship to writing through fanfiction, growing up with a combination of brown pride and gay shame, and receiving an autism diagnosis later in life. Listen to the interview at qtpocart.libsyn.com. Support the podcast at patreon.com/artactivistnia.

Read the transcript here. Support the podcast here.

[aaenglish236]

BANANA MAGAZINE  - ALL THINGS AZN  ✨🍌

“The groundbreaking platform exists to highlight Asian voices, not just include them” - Huffpost 

I came across this New York based magazine called Banana Mag, a few years ago that uses their platform as an outlet to create a voice for contemporary Asian culture. The magazine echoes the variety of opinions and ideas on what it means to be Asian today. By, “Exploring different perspectives of Asian culture, traditions, and identity that weren’t initially familiar to us. We stepped into new worlds and found familiarity in our shared experiences as Asians in today’s cultural climate” (Banana Mag Editors’ letter in Issue 003). Back in high school I was searching for contemporary outlets that explored Asian identity to recommend to a club I had a great opportunity in leading “Asian Student Union”. Amongst many art creatives/organizations/outlets I saw via Instagram, Banana Magazine seemed to truly encompass all things azn with an engaging and influential platform.

Birthed in Chinatown NYC, Banana Magazine arrived on instagram June 2014 with their first “Issue 001” launched in stores February 2015. The founders, Kathleen Tso and Vicki Ho note, “The choice for the name Banana is meant to be an inside joke. For anyone who has ever been called a ‘banana,’ you know that it’s a nickname that has been given to many first generation Asians growing up in a western world, like us. It’s not meant to be derogatory, but celebratory.” Aiming to use this magazine as a platform to celebrate, highlight and contribute to the conversation of defining our collective identity. In the magazine’s mission statement, its founders note they “strive to navigate through the blurred Eastern and Western boundaries to create a voice for contemporary Asian culture.” Their latest “Issue 006” dropped May 16th 2020 just in time for Asian and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month. All Banana Mag’s Issue thus far features an upcoming Asian creative to design a cover alongside a multifaceted team of editors of color. Another thing to note by the founders is, “Whether it is rediscovering your grandma’s herbal soup recipes, exploring current Asian beauty culture through an editorial, or commissioning original artwork to represent the dichotomy that can exist between two cultures, our content aims to cover all things AZN”.

Many aspects of Banana Mag intrigued me which pushed forward a sudden curiosity I had within my Asian identity. For the first time I saw a platform that was made for Asian Americans in such a creative and vast manner that encapsulated our multifaceted identity where I didn’t feel tokenized. While I took part in activism, this platform shed light on so many aspects of Asian culture that I myself have barely discussed. One of my favorite issues from Banana Mag “003” explored “The relationship Asian Americans have with gender identity - navigating through the ever changing definitions of masculinity and femininity through a series of profiles.” I have yet to see a magazine dedicate a column, let alone an entire issue on qtpoc, from a multitude of vast experiences and/or people.

This magazine has helped aid my education towards discovering more of my identity and the many aspects it holds for us right alongside the texts offered in the classroom. From Asian American Lit. the array of discussion boards and literature offered that allow us to be vocal on matters that are important in our political climate, Banana mag, is what creates a visual platform in assistance to these very topics.

Sources/Info

Instagram : Bananamag Website : http://www.banana-mag.com Huffpost  : “You Won’t Find Any Token Asians In Banana Magazine”

- Amirah S.

[foreverthesoniag]

Aww thank you to @jessxsnow for mailing me this beautiful book. Jess illustrated “The Ocean Calls” a book which is written by Korean writer Tina Cho. ✨🌊The Ocean Calls is a book about a Haenyeo grandmother teaching her deep sea pearl diving tradition to Dayeon, a young granddaughter who must overcome her fear of the ocean. I’m here for all these incredible children books teaching our tiny humans about important issues, about our community power, and tenderness. Make sure to go and purchase “The Ocean Calls” , and while you are at it go and purchase “AntiRacist Baby” written by @ibramxk , illustrated by @ashlukadraws . Go and purchase “They Call Me Mix” ( @theycallmemix ) written by @soylulis and illustrated by @breenache - a book about pronouns. Go and support these books written by us and for us. #books #literature #socialjustice #qtpoc #queer #lgbtq https://www.instagram.com/p/CDuwUfCFH3k/?igshid=1l46elu39ceav

[theglamfemme]

"Every day, because of misogyny, racism, transphobia, and homophobia, queer and trans Black women feel the sting of rejection to the point that many of us have become numb to it. Instead of succumbing to an existence that takes up less space, we have become louder and prouder in our fight: not only for ourselves, but for other queer folks and people of color. One of the ways Black queer and trans women have responded is by expressing ourselves creatively. We have done this throughout history using mediums such as literature, art, music, poetry, fashion, and film to explore themes of social justice. Whether a safe space was formed inadvertently from this creative expression, or whether it was intentional, it is clear that these spaces are imperative to protecting our humanity." - Patricia Martin (@patriciamartinwrites), founder of The Glam Femme, for @clrblq ⠀ 🌈✨🖤✊🏾👑 #happypride #gaypride #lgbtqpride #pride #qwoc #qtpoc #lesbian #queer #gay #trans #transgender #bisexual #pansexual #asexual #genderqueer #gendernonconforming #gnc #nonbinary #genderfluid #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtqia #theglamfemme http://bit.ly/31n3a5O