Artists and Speakers

2017 

Keynote Speaker: T.J. Jourian

T.J. Jourian is a queer Middle Eastern Armenian transman hell-bent on imagining alternative worlds, ways of being and doing things, centered in love and critical praxis and scholarship. His research situates queer and trans people, especially queer and trans people of color, as agentic worldmakers creating alternative perspectives and reconstructing all that which cisheteronormative society takes for granted.

Featured Artist: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer, sick, and disabled nonbinary femme writer and cultural worker of Burger/ Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/ Roma ascent. The author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (Publisher's Triangle and Lambda Award 2016 finalist, American Library Association Stonewall Award winner 2016), Bodymap (Audre Lorde Poetry Award Finalist, Publisher's Triangle), Love Cake (Lambda Award winner 2012) and Consensual Genocide, she is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. Her work has been widely published, most recently in The Deaf Poets Society, Glitter and Grit and Octavia's Brood, and including work in the anthologies Dear Sister, Undoing Border Imperialism, Stay Solid, Persistence: Still Butch and Femme, Yes Means Yes, Visible: A Femmethology, Homelands, Colonize This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Bitchfest, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Brazen Femme, Femme and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over The World.

Featured Artist: Morgan M Page

Morgan M Page (Odofemi) is multiple award-winning performance + video artist, writer, activist, and Santera in Canada. Her bold, nightmarish performance art appears regularly on stages and in galleries throughout Canada and the United States, and her video art has screened in South Korea, Hong Kong, Germany, and Australia. She has written for Feministing, PrettyQueer.com, Tits and Sass, and fab magazine about trans, sex work, and HIV issues. Her non-fiction also appears in Cleis Press’ Best Sex Writing of the Year (ed. Jon Pressick). She is currently at work on her first novel; her short fiction has appeared online and in anthologies, including Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse (ed. Silvia Moreno-Gracia; Exile Editions, 2014). In addition to her art practice, Morgan works locally, nationally, and internationally on issues relating to trans people, sex work, and HIV. Through her work as an organizer and social services provider, Morgan regularly provides lectures, trainings, workshops, and policy development to organizations, community groups, colleges, and universities throughout Canada and the United States. She is known for writing the widely-distributed BRAZEN: Trans Women’s Safer Sex Guide, available from CATIE in English and French. She is the recipient of the Youthline’s Community Empowerment Award (2011), along with two 2013 SF MOTHA awards for her work as an artist and curator. Most recently, Morgan was a 2014 Lambda Literary Fellow.

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