Subhaga Crystal Bacon reads from her new collection alongside local poets Luther Hughes, Jourdan Imani Keith, and Cindy Veach. Transistory is a chronicle of transgender and gender nonconforming people murdered in 2020 interspersed with the poet’s own journey as a Queer person.
Grounded in protest and solidarity, Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s Isabella Gardner Award-winning Transitory is a collection of elegies memorializing 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020.
Epistolary in nature, these commemorative poems are “gleaned sketches” attempting to reconstruct lives and deaths from the typically scarce information made available on the internet. Interspersed with the elegies are personal explorations of gender identities and sexualities from a Queer elder who has lived through the post-Stonewall years of sexual liberation, the second wave of feminism, and the recent rapid increases in awareness about gender and sexualities met almost equally with anti-trans and anti-Queer violence.
Seen through the lenses of whiteness and privilege from the last quarter of a lifetime, these poems navigate the desire to be at home in our bodies, to be loved and desired without danger, and most of all to live free, healthy, and welcome in the world we inhabit.
Subhaga Crystal Bacon is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry. Her latest book, Transitory is the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, from BOA Editions, and was listed in the Library Journal’s list of Books to Read in 2023. She’s the author of Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, 2023, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, Blue Hunger, Methow Press, 2020, and Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, winner of the A. Poulin New Poetry America Prize, BOA Editions, 2004. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she’s a teaching artist working in schools and libraries with youth and adults, as well as private students. Her work appears in a variety of print and online journals including the Bellevue Literary Review, Indianapolis Review, Rise Up Review, Ghost City Review and others.
Luther Hughes (they/them) is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves (BOA Editions, 2022), listed as best books of 2022 in The New Yorker, and the chapbook, Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), recommended by the American Library Association. They are the founder of Shade Literary Arts, an organization for queer writers of color, and cohosts The Poet Salon Podcast with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat. Recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Rosenberg Fellowship and the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, they received their MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Their writing has been published in The Paris Review, Orion, American Poetry Review, and others. They’ve been featured in The Seattle Times, Forbes, Essence, KUOW Public Radio, The Slowdown, and more. Luther lives in Seattle, where they were born and raised.
Jourdan Imani Keith is Seattle’s 2019- 2022 Civic Poet. Featured in Forbes and on NPR, her Orion Magazine essays, "Desegregating Wilderness" and "At Risk" appear in the Best American Science and Nature Writing Anthology, as well as textbooks. The founder of Urban Wilderness Project she leads its R U An Endangered Species™ Women and Whales campaign. A recipient of the 2022 US Water Alliance Outstanding Artist and2018 Americans for the Arts award, her TEDx Talk, Your Body of Water became the theme for King County's 2016-2018 Poetry on Buses program.
Cindy Veach is the author of Gloved Against Blood and the chapbook Innocents. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sugar House Review, The Journal, Salamander, Nimrod International Journal, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Poet Lore, among others.