Nia King – – Queer and Trans Artists of Color Vol III ft. Anthony James Williams, Luna Merbruja, Paradise Khanmalek, and co-editor Maliha Ahmed

EAST BAY BOOKSELLERS is so excited to welcome back Nia King to discuss her new anthology Queer and Trans Artists of Color Volume Three. She will be joined by several contributors including, Anthony James Williams, Luna Merbruja, Paradise Khanmalek, and co-editor Maliha Ahmed.

For the last year, Nia King and co-editor Maliha Ahmed have been hard at work on Queer & Trans Artists of Color, Volume 3, featuring interviews with Anthony J. Williams, Osa Atoe, Venus Di’Khadijah Selenite, Ah Mer Ah Su, Gabby Rivera, Joamette Gil, Mey Rude, Kai Cheng Thom, Jia qing wilson-yang, Sarah Burke, Sam Levin, Arielle Twist, Paradise Khanmalek, Qwo-Li Driskill, and Kamal Al-Solaylee! The launch party will be a talk show-style event where Nia interviews queer and trans artists of color live before an audience.

This event will be free and open to the public. There will also be free food for all in attendance!

About the Contributors:

Nia King is a queer Black/Lebanese/Hungarian Jewish author and podcaster from Canton, MA who lived in Oakland, CA from 2008-2019. She has been hosting and producing We Want the Airwaves podcast (available in iTunes) since 2013. She self-published her first book, Queer & Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives, with co-editors Jessica Glennon-Zukoff and Terra Mikalson in 2014, and her second book, Queer & Trans Artists of Color, Volume 2, edited by Elena Rose, in 2016. Nia’s writing and comics have been published at Colorlines.com, East Bay Express, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. She received a Best of the East Bay Award in 2016 and was featured in KQED’s Bay Brilliant series (formerly Women to Watch) in 2018. She loves and misses Oakland dearly. You can find more of her work at niaking.com.

Anthony James Williams (they/them pronouns) is a Black queer non-binary writer, sociology PhD student, and facilitator. They’re responsible for popularizing the hashtag #MasculinitySoFragile and their published writing (Hazlitt, The Outline, Electric Lit) focuses on race, sexuality, and mental health. Their prior Black student organizing led the University of California system to divest $25 million from private prisons. Find them on twitter @anthoknees or antjwilliams.com.

Luna Merbruja is a Mexican-Athabaskan writer and artist. They are the author of the Lambda Literary Award-nominated poetry book, Heal Your Love. They have published short stories and essays in The Resilience Anthology, Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic, and the second edition of Colonize This! Feel free to follow their work at luna.merbruja.com, IG: @LunaMerbruja, or contact by email: lunamerbruja@gmail.com.

Paradise Khanmalek is an Iranian American artist, poet, and graphic designer from Los Angeles. She creates illustrated books of poetry, takes photographs, and most recently self-published a book of semi-academic poetic text about entropy, gender, and the semiotics of the visual world. Find her work online at Pardislili.com and @Humanchandelier on Instagram.

If you are interested and able to help contirbute to the fund to pay for artists travel expenses, ASL interpretation at the event and a caterer please check out https://www.gofundme.com/f/queer-amp-trans-artists-of-color-volume-3-launch?member=2377338