Author Panel recap: MLA 2024 Conference

Angela Y. Davis is repeating over and over again that Abolition and its struggle against state-sanctioned violence is inextricable from Feminism and its struggle against gender violence, and I am driving to Rochester and have already spotted 3 State Troopers on my route today. That makes 7 in 2 days—5 of them posted on my usual routes. Davis lists a number of transgender organizations working in collaboration, and I feel included in this struggle. I am welcome in it. It is my struggle, though I am not a woman.

5 minutes left of the “Epilogue” I pull into the Mayo Civic Center Parking Lot.

I use the men’s bathroom, and at first am told there is no lunch for me and where my author exhibit is, but as I am setting up, he brings the salad, chicken, rice, and veggies. Famished, I eat the food. I am approached by Jessi Atherton, then, joined at a table on my right by Sherrie Fernandez-Williams—both authors on my poetry panel. Sherrie purchases a copy of Bodies in Transition.

Jessi is a disabled Iraqi War veteran, mother of three, psychiatric nurse practitioner, and firm believer that anybody can be a poet and write Literature with a capital L. She takes veterans on ekphrastic poetry missions to monuments. Her poetry collection The Time War Takes came out in April 2023 and received an Honorable Mention in Senators Bob and Elizabeth Dole Inaugural Biennial Award for Distinguished Book in Veterans Studies in 2024 and Community of Literary Magazines and Presses must read for Women’s History Month, also in 2024.

Sherrie is a Black, Queer writer with an MFA from Hamline University, a previous Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and has received numerous awards and grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft Literary Center, The Givens Foundation for African American Literature, Intermedia Arts, SASE: The Write Place, and The Playwrights’ Center. She has a book of poems called The Goddess of The Whole Self, a memoir called Soft, and essays in the anthologies We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, How Dare We Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse, and The Poverty and Education Reader. She is both adjunct faculty and co-directs Queer Voices Minnesota.

Honored to be in such a presence, I wait at my exhibit table until our panel, ducking out only briefly to smoke my Peterson pipe.

I would also be honored to be allowed to share some of my favorite poets with this community of librarians at Sara Gliniecki’s behest. Sara is the Interlibrary Loan Specialist at the Kathryn A. Martin Library at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She, along with Kate Sheridan of the University of Minnesota Libraries, invited us to be on the panel. My earliest poetry inspirations came from my grad school introduction to Jazz poets Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, then a friend introduced me to the beatniks Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. I loved these poets for their rhythm and sound. In 2015-2016, I was very heavy into the Instagram writing community and found inspiration in typewriterpoet and influencer Christopher Poindexter. His well-known work released around then was Naked Human. I have since worked with him and his independent publishing company Jack Wild Publishing, founded with his two brothers.

One of my prize poetry books in my collection is the out-of-print For Me, For You, For Us by Brit-Filipino poet Romlynn Ramos. It is a tale of love, longing, and loss, and the connectedness of the stars. Another out-of-print poetry book that I have found it impossible to get my hands on is Azhar by Afro-Palestinian poet Isra Al-Thibeh. Isra Al-Thibeh is especially meaningful to me as due to her liking one of my poems, “Ecclesiastes,” I learned about the apartheid for the first time.

The fortunate thing about Instagram poets like these is that most of their work is or has been freely available online, including mine. It is a much more community-oriented dream. Our work is accessible; it is collaborative; it is inspired; it is hypermedia. Like Literature with a capital L, you will find allusions to other authors across our works.

Recently, I went to #AWP24 and discovered a new poet Tacey M. Atsitty. She read a piece from a collection she was working on about Indigenous monster myths, and it really spoke to me as a trans man. In it, the speaker could hear a monster crying and wanted to comfort him. After I learned the monsters had actually done quite horrible things, unlike trans men, but the amount of care the speaker felt for a human being stuck with me as a person who has been treated like a monster. The book was not available yet, so I purchased Rain Scald. I am reminded of one of Isra Al-Thibeh’s most famous poems: “Do not cut the unloved parts of yourself. Water them and let them grow.”

Michael Kleber-Diggs shared dozens of Minnesota poets that we should all read, including him. His debut poetry collection Worldly Things was published by Milkweed in 2021, winning the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He is part of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and is an adjunct professor as well.

I first learned of Michael from his picture being on the wall for the Meet-the-Author series at North Hennepin Community College, but I really learned of him from his personal essay in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars. Something I made sure to conclude with at the author panel is the importance of sharing BIPOC stories beyond police brutality, deaths, the history of enslavement, including incarceration, as something that the library can do as they consider their collections. A friend of mine shared this to their Instagram just this morning, about how they want to see Black people in nature. Similarly, I shared that it is important for trans people, specifically trans men to be able to find positive stories about themselves.

I shared this because, as I was teaching this summer and curating possible research materials for my courses through the library, I found it nearly impossible to find anything on trans men or trans masculinity that did not describe them as toxic. As I was searching for alternate forms of masculinity to white capitalist patriarchal masculinity, since bell hooks suggests we must offer them, not just critique the patriarchy, these search results were supremely disappointing. I was forced to supply books from my own personal collection: Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman’s Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation and Mitch Kellaway and Zander Keig’s Manning Up: Transsexual Men on Finding Brotherhood, Family, and Themselves.

We need to envision better futures, futures where we are free.