Fair Weather Reading Series

w/Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha & Danielle Cadena Deulen

Saturday, February 20
7pm (doors at 6:30)
lemonade and snacks served

Curator: Kristen E. Nelson
Location: outdoor courtyard
Description: This series celebrates LGBTQ writers, female writers, writers of color, emerging writers, and other underrepresented groups. Everyone is welcome to attend!

Sometimes there will be music. Sometimes there will be dancing. Sometimes there will be video. Sometimes there will be swimming. Sometimes there will be surprises. Sometimes there will be raffles. Sometimes there will be fancy food. Sometimes there will be fancy drinks. Sometimes it will rain and you should bring an umbrella. Sometimes it will be chilly and you should bring a blanket. It is called the Fair Weather Reading Series for all of these reasons and more.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, performance artist and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent.  The author of the Lambda Award-winning Love Cake, Dirty River,  Bodymap and Consensual Genocide and co-editor with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, her writings on femme of color and Sri Lankan identities, survivorhood, and healing, disability and transformative justice have appeared in the anthologies Octavia's Brood, Dear Sister, Letters Lived, 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. She is the co-founder of Mangos With Chili, North America's touring queer and trans people of color cabaret, a lead artist with the disability justice incubator Sins Invalid and co-founder of Toronto's Asian Arts Freedom School. In 2010 she was named one of the Feminist Press' 40 Feminists Under 40 Shaping the Future, and she is a 2013 Autostraddle Hot 105 member.  She lives between Toronto, unceded Three Fires Confederacy Territories and Seattle, unceded Duwamish territories, with the love of her life, a wolfdog, and her friend family.

Danielle Cadena Deulen is a poet and essayist.  Her first collection of poems, Lovely Asunder (University of Arkansas Press, 2011), won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award. Her memoir, The Riots (University of Georgia Press, 2011), won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award. Her second poetry collection, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, won the Barrow Street Book Contest and will be published with Barrow Street Press in 2015.  She has been the recipient of a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Crazyhorse, North American Review, Diagram,The Kenyon Review, The Utne Reader, and The Missouri Review, as well as several anthologies, including Best New Poets, The Montreal Global Poetry Anthology 2013, and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays. She currently lives in Salem, Oregon where she teaches for the English Department of Willamette University.