Tag: queer

FREE EVENT: CAPTURING FIRE | SATURDAY, June 20, 2020 @ 2:00 PM

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Over at Reading Queer, we’re adapting to the pandemic to ensure that queer voices are heard no matter what’s going on in the world. To that end, we’ve expanded our Writing Academy where we hold free writing workshops every third Saturday of the month. This coming Saturday, June 20th, you can jumpstart your writing with queer spoken word artist Regie Cabico, who will also headline the inaugural Candela Literary Pride Festival. Capturing Fire will be a virtual poetry writing workshop for the LGBTQ community and allies. Zoom link & password will be emailed to you 24 hours before event. RSVP here: Sign me up! 

For Pride Month, we’ve just announced the Candela Literary Pride Festival,a series of virtual readings, performances and workshops celebrating Queer Resilience and Protest during the 2020 Pandemic. Receive a schedule of events when you sign up 💁🏼 here. 

Donate to Reading Queer

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Help me raise $5,000 before November 15th and fuel the future of queer literary culture in South Florida. Support life-affirming programming by and for the community @ readingqueer.org/donate

Meet Parvati Villarba, Programming Director @ Reading Queer.

“Reading Queer has taught me that Queerness transcends race, gender, sexuality, and class— by which it is an umbrella term for many concepts, cultures, and the universal groups it affects. The organization has always allowed for my voice to be heard. Through the intimate workshops curated, I’ve encountered communities that tenderly brave the twilight of an exclusionary world— only to find the beauty in their inner and outer selves. I owe my self acceptance to Reading Queer and the writers that have come along because of it. Thank you.” —Parvati Villaraba.

#queer #lgbtq #donate #literature #givemiamiday2018

Reading Queer Literary Festival 2017

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2017 marks the third iteration of the Reading Queer Literary Festival, which I co-founded in 2014. This year, Reading Queer partnered with the Miami Book Fair, The Olympia Theater and O Cinema Wynwood to create a series of queer-centric cultural programming for South Florida.

I’m incredibly excited that Chen Chen (Long listed for the 2017 National Book Award – Poetry), t’ai freedom Continue reading “Reading Queer Literary Festival 2017” →

Miami New Times interviews Neil de la Flor about Reading Queer: Poetry In A Time of Chaos

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Miami New Times interviews Neil de la Flor about Reading Queer: Poetry In A Time of Chaos, a new anthology he co-editedwith  Maureen Seaton.

Excerpt: “As Miami’s cultural landscape boomed in the past decade — with the influx of major art fairs, new museums, and local galleries opening in up-and-coming neighborhoods — the city’s queer culture was in flux. Reading Queer, a Knight Foundation-sponsored cultural organization, is looking to change that fact by highlighting voices from a community that remains fractured between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Recently, the group announced a publication deal for a paperback anthology of poetry from local bards and internationally recognized queer writers.”

“’I think it’s the first Miami-based anthology of queer voices,” says founder Neil de la Flor, who has also contributed to New Times. ‘Poetry has had a resurgence because of the political climate and the need to huddle together and connect. Queer writers have an ever greater need to reach each other through every means,’ he says, including social media and poetry.'”

“Thanks to Reading Queer, Miami’s LGBTQ community has had a forum that gives voice to underrepresented stories. It’s badly needed in a city whose queer culture was split in two after the gentrification of South Beach.”

Read the full article here.

 

Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos

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I’m happy to announce the forthcoming anthology Reading Queer: Poetry In A Time of Chaos, (Anhinga Press, 2018), which brings together fifty LGBTQ poets in the spirit and solidarity of poetry at its finest and fiercest. 

Pre-order now @ http://www.anhingapress.org/poetry/reading-queer-poetry-in-a-time-of-chaos. 

Edited by Neil de la Flor and Maureen Seaton, Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos is vulnerable, sexy, heartbreaking, revolutionary. It’s poetry that pushes against and beyond boundaries in both form and content.

Featuring: Thalo Kersey, Aaron Smith, Bryan Borland, Caridad Moro-Fronlier, Cathleen Chambless, Celeste Gainey, cin salach, Collin Kelley, Eduardo C. Corral, Elizabeth Bradfield, Ellen Bass, Farah Milagros Yamini, Gem Blackthorn, Gerry Gomez Pearlberg, Gregg Shapiro, Holly Iglesias, James Allen Hall, Jan Becker, Jason Schneiderman, Jen Benka, Jim Elledge, JV Portela, Joseph O. Legaspi, JP Howard, Julie Marie Wade, Julie R. Enzer, Justin Torres, Kevin Simmonds, L. Lamar Wilson, Lori Anderson, Megan Volpert, Meredith Camel, Phillip B. Williams, Qwo-Li Driskill, Ruben Quesada, sam sax, Samiya Bashir, Samuel Ace, Seth Pennington, Shane Allison, Stacey Waite, Stephanie Lane Sutton, Stephen S. Mills, Tara Burke, Ching-In Chen, Nicholas Wong, tc tolbert and Valerie Wetlaufer.

To receive notice of publication, subscribe here.

Ensure that queer voices are never silenced. Donate today and support the launch of Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos. The Knight Foundation will match every dollar that you donate today (up to $70,000). Example: Donate $50 and the Knight Foundation wil match your $50 giving Reading Queer a total donation of $100. 

Double your impact today. Donate now: readingqueer.org/donate.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation: Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit knightfoundation.org/.

Reading Queer Awarded $70,000 Knight Arts Challenge Grant Miami

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The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awards Reading Queer a 2016 Knight Arts Challenge Miami (KACM) grant, a community-wide initiative funding the best ideas for the arts in South Florida. This is the second KACM grant awarded to Reading Queer since 2013.

“The KACM grant will strengthen Reading Queer and its mission to foster and promote queer literary culture in South Florida by expanding the annual RQ Literary Festival, which is the first and only queer centric literary festival of its kind in the region, with a series of main stage performances, writing workshops and literary installations,” said Neil de la Flor, Executive Director of Reading Queer. “With the aim of advancing the careers of emerging and established queer-identified writers, Reading Queer will also expand the RQ Writing Academy and collaborate with The Betsy Hotel-South Beach to launch the week-long RQ Writers in Residence program.”

With rapidly changing conceptions of gender and sexuality and a historical moment defined by racialized forms of violence against various marginalized groups of queer-identified people, Reading Queer empowers and provides a safe space for aspiring, emerging and established queer writers to create and share their work with the community. Reading Queer serves as both respite and resource to amplify queer voices and effect change.

We need your financial support to continue our work in the community. The Knight Foundation will match it dollar for dollar up to $70,000.

Donate now: readingqueer.org/donate.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation: Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit knightfoundation.org/.

Out of darkness, light: Queer film series launches with ‘Before Night Falls’

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For KnightBlog, I wrote about the old independent film center Alliance Cinema (South Beach), my first encounter with Javier Bardem and its connection to Queer Screens: LGBTQ Film Series, a new film series co-presented by Reading Queer and O Cinema. It was a difficult, but formative period of my life. The Alliance Cinema made coming out in the early 1990s and the horrors of the AIDS epidemic palpable. It was the first time I felt I had a community, that I fit in, that I mattered even though I was always the one kind of hiding in a dark corner.

Here’s an excerpt from the article: “In the 1990s, the Alliance Cinema was the pulse of South Beach–a center for independent film culture and, most importantly for me, a safe space for a burgeoning queer community. It’s where I met Javier Bardem….

In that dark, single-screen, six-row theater, I felt safe watching films that revealed the multitudes of being and becoming queer, with my community sitting next to me. It would pull me out of darkness more than once.”

Read more > here.

Before_Night_Falls_poster-1Raised in the Oriente Province of Cuba in the 1940s, Arenas began his life-long love of the sea and water. Leaving home as a young adolescent, he moves to Havana where he finds himself swept up in the revolutionary spirit and joins a circle of writers and artists. His first novel, “Singing from the Well,” is published in Cuba, but as Castro’s oppressive regime gathers force, Arenas’ homosexuality and political writing make him a target. After being falsely accused of molestation, Arenas is arrested and imprisoned at El Morro. Eventually released from prison after dehumanizing treatment, Arenas flees Cuba in the 1980 Mariel Harbor boatlift. After moving to New York with his friend Lazaro Gomez Carilles, Arenas’ hopes for a new life are destroyed by AIDS, and he dies in 1993, at the age of 45.

Fundraiser for victims of Pulse attack

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Reading Queer in collaboration with O Cinema, Pridelines, Aqua Foundation, Miami Jewish Film Festival and the MIFO LGBT Film Festival present the academy awarding winning film MILK in honor of the victims of the Orlando attack. 100% of all funds collected will be donated directly to the Equality Florida fund.

Buy tickets > here http://www.o-cinema.org/event/milk/ 

Thursday, June 23rd @ 8pm at O Cinema Miami Beach.