Please join us we welcome KB Brookins who will read from their new full length collection of poetry, Freedom House. KB will be joined by poets Jazz Bell and Gaby Benitez.
In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins' formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different "rooms". The speaker isn't afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more -- all while using humor and craft.
What does freedom look like? What can we learn from nature and our past? How do you reintroduce yourself in a world that refuses queerness? How can we use poetry as a tool in the toolbox that helps build freedom? This collection explores those questions, and manifests a world where Black, queer, and trans people get to live.
KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer and cultural worker from Texas. Their chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) won the Saguaro Poetry Prize. KB's poems and essays are published in Poets.org, Huffington Post, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. They have earned fellowships from PEN America, Civil Rights Corps, and Lambda Literary among others. KB's debut memoir PRETTY (Alfred A. Knopf) will arrive in 2024, and they are a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts fellow. Follow KB online at @earthtokb.
Gaby Benitez (she/her/ella), is a queer, xicanx, neurodivergent writer in her quarter-life-crisis living in her evergentrifying hometown of Austin, TX. She writes to make sense of her experience living in this tumultuous world, to make sense of the ways we relate to others, the earth, and the cycles of life and death. Much of her writing is through the lens of the body as a borderlands, meeting place, and interdimensional highway. Gaby would have coffee and sweet plantains for every meal if given the option. Her work has been published in Moist Poetry Journal, Wussy Mag, StoneofMadness Press, Infrarrealista Review, Liminal Transit Review, and other scattered spaces. She can be found on instagram @gabriellebenitez or twitter @gaygardengoth
Jazz Bell is a multimedia artist, consultant, & care worker based in Austin TX. Their poetry has been published in Muzzle Magazine, Nat. Brut, Button Poetry, Write About Now, & elsewhere. They were a Write Bloody chapbook contest finalist, pink door fellow, and Fresh A.I.R. resident. Visit their website at jazzbell.me
