But Also #23: Gabriel, Awkward-Rich, van Dyck, Wilson & Mendoza

The But Also returns virtually on Saturday, April 25th featuring Kay Gabriel, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Stephen van Dyck, Claudia Wilson and Paula Mendoza

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She’s the author of Elegy Department Spring / Candy Sonnets 1 (BOAAT Press, 2017) and a member of the editorial collective for the Poetry Project Newsletter. With Andrea Abi-Karam she’s co-editing We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, forthcoming from Nightboat in fall 2020. Find her recent work in the Brooklyn Rail, Social Text and the LA Review of Books.

A poet and scholar, Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two collections of poetry: Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019). His writing has appeared/is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-day, American Quarterly, Signs, Science Fiction Studies and elsewhere. Cameron has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and Duke University’s program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Presently, he is an assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Stephen van Dyck’s People I’ve Met From the Internet is a queer
reimagining of the coming-of-age narrative set at the dawn of the internet era. In 1997, AOL is first entering suburban homes just as thirteen-year-old Stephen is coming into his sexuality, constructing selves and cruising in the fantasyscape of the internet. Through strange, intimate, and sometimes perilous physical encounters with the hundreds of men he finds there, Stephen explores the pleasures and pains of growing up, contends with his mother’s homophobia and early death, and ultimately searches for a way of being in the world. Spanning twelve years, the book takes the form of a very long
annotated list, tracking Stephen’s journey and the men he meets from adolescence in New Mexico to post-recession adulthood in Los Angeles, creating a multi-dimensional panorama of gay men’s lives as he searches for glimpses of utopia in the available world.

CLAUDIA M. WILSON is a poet, instructor, & social worker who lives and plays in Amherst, MA. They have featured at various venues in Ohio & Boston such as Writer’s Block, Fazenda Queer Reading, & The Oberon. Claudia’s present work in progress centers embodiment, familial relationships, blackness and living in the woods, and WWF wrestlers from the mid-’80s. Claudia is a TWH & VONA graduate. Their chapbook GROWN was published through Game Over Books Press and is about Claudia’s time in foster care. They study poetry at Umass Amherst and they live with their cat Pablo a.k.a Lil Pooder a.k.a Pooderbutt. They’re originally from Cleveland & Columbus, Ohio.

Paula Mendoza earned her MFA at the University of Michigan and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. Her first book, Play for Time, winner of the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize, is due out May 2020. She lives and writes in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Reading will start at 7pm EST. Zoom link coming soon.