Coming from Stockton, California, Anna Allen has always held a deep interest in poetry. All throughout elementary school, she looked forward to the month where the class was instructed to write stories. That interest will be there, she believes, forever.

Why do you write? What compels you to write?
With the state of the world today and the past, I feel that the one of the things that I can do for myself, my community and my family is write. I love to write poetry because it is a dedicated art form for anyone to get involved in. I’m increasingly blown away by the talent and strength I hear and see from the people in the poetry community. It’s contagious.

What upcoming writing projects are you working on?
Right now, I am working on a small book of poetry. It is called, “Tweets From Birmingham Jail”. It examines the relationship between Black folks and the police and the trauma that Blacks are given. It examines the racial stress Black people have felt since birth. It’s highly emotional and it’s taking a lot out of me. It is taking a while to write it. But I will be done soon!

Describe your work in five words
Morose
Black/Queer/Disabled
Hopeful
Strange
Edgy

What are some of your artistic influences/inspirations?
Everything by Gwendolyn Brooks has been a huge inspiration. Same with James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Every time I look at Frida Kahlo’s work, I want to write.

​We're BACK with another rendition of RADAR's GLOW feature, where we spotlight QTPOC writers in the community. Did you miss us? We're very lucky to showcase Yodassa Williams! Her debut novel, The Goddess Twins, was released this past May and it's a fantastic magical adventure that takes the reader from Ohio to London. The novel follows identical twins, Arden and Aurora, as they develop their telepathic and telekinetic powers while uncovering ancestral secrets. You're not going to regret picking up this book! 

Yodassa Williams is a Jamaican American writer, speaker, and award winning performing storyteller, passionate about using her curiosity to spark fires inside others. Yodassa is an alumna of the VONA/Voices Travel Writing program, the 2018 Fortify Writers Retreat, and a writing residency with Nefe Nof. She is a blogger for the 2020 Debutante Ball. In October of 2019, Yodassa launched ‘Writers Emerging’ a four day wilderness writing retreat for women of color and non-binary people of color, held at Fly Ranch. Her debut novel, a YA fantasy, details the adventure of seventeen year old Caribbean American twins discovering they are goddesses when their mother goes missing. The Goddess Twins, published by SparkPress in May 2020, is now available on Amazon and IndieBound. Yodassa grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and currently resides in the Bay Area.

​RADAR Superstar is teaming up with THE STUD to take our writers virtual! Join us for a stellar show on June 2nd at 6:30pm!
Featuring:
Sister Spit 2020
Baruch Porras-Hernandez
Yodassa Williams
Special Guests: March Show Us Your Spines Residents
View Here: https://m.twitch.tv/dragalive/profile
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▼ANANYA GARG▼
Ananya Garg is a young queer Indian poet and spoken word performance artist. She is slowly learning to heal and shine. She sees her QTPOC arts community as a central force in her healing process and hopes her words can be a part of your healing. She attended the the University of Washington where she studied Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies & Comparative History of Ideas, with minors in Anthropology & Diversity. ​ You can find her working as an Educator with the Washington Building Leaders of Change Seattle Freedom Schools at Rainier Beach High School. She is also a poet/performance/teaching artist in the Seattle area.
▼BARUCH PORRAS HERNANDEZ▼
Baruch Porras Hernandez is a queer Mexican Immigrant from Toluca, Mexico. He is a writer, performer, storyteller, playwright and stand-up comedian, a two-time winner of Literary Death Match, a Lambda Literary Poetry Fellow, a Lambda Literary Playwriting Fellow, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and was named a Bay Area Writer to Watch! in 2016 by 7×7 San Francisco Magazine. He is the founder and host of ¿Donde Esta Mi Gente? Latinx Literary Series, a regular KQED Arts host, and was the Voice of Shipwreck SF Erotic Fan Fiction Competition and podcast for four years and hosted the legendary SF Queer Open Mic for 7 years. His poems have been published in several anthologies and journals, both online and in print. Last summer he had the honor of being an artist in residence at the Ground Floor Summer Lab with Berkeley Repertory Theatre. He lives in San Francisco.
▼CREATRIX TIARA▼
Creatrix Tiara (pronouns: Tiara, or they/them) works with creative arts & media, technology, games, community cultural development, and education to explore ideas around community, identity, liminality, belonging, and social justice. Tiara is very interested in exploring the ways that various mediums can be used to convey and support experiences of transience and flux while also building empathy and understanding for experiences and stories outside one's own. In 2018 Creatrix Tiara wrote, produced, and performed in their first full-length theatre show, Queer Lady Magician, exploring stage magic through a queer, feminist, decolonial lens. Tiara also performs and produces for LGBTQIA+ disability arts collective Quippings, was a Dandy Minion and Burlesque Dancer in the 2017 Melbourne Festival production of Taylor Mac's 24 Decade History of Popular Music, produced and performed for San Francisco South Asian women's theatre program Yoni Ki Baat, and has made work across US, Australia, and elsewhere.
▼DENA ROD▼
Dena Rod is a writer, editor, and poet based in the Bay Area. A graduate of San Francisco State University, they have an M.A. in English Literature. They run the RADAR Productions weblog and are the Assistant Creative Nonfiction Editor at homology lit, and formerly the Managing Editor of Argot Literary Magazine. They were selected for RADAR Productions’ Show Us Your Spines Residency, Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writer’s Lab, and Winter Tangerine’s Summer Writer’s Workshop. Through creative nonfiction essays and poetry, Dena works to illuminate their diasporic experiences of Iranian American heritage and queer identity, combating negative stereotypes of their intersecting identities in the mainstream media.
▼IMANI SIMS▼
Imani Sims is an alchemist and author. She believes in the healing power of community ritual and performance art. As Director for RADAR Productions she continues to elevate the narratives of QTPOC folk all over the nation. Her work illuminates the death and life living within the black femme.
▼JUNAUDA PETRUS-NASAH▼
Junauda Petrus is a writer, pleasure activist, filmmaker, runaway witch, cosmic bag lady and performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born on Dakota land. She creates performance and written work centering in wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, an experimental arts production company. She is currently writing and directing, "Sweetness of Wild" a poetic-episodic film series themed around Blackness, queerness, biking, resistance, love and coming of age in Minneapolis. Her first young adult novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them, debuts September 2019 on Dutton Children’s. It’s about queer, Black diasporic love, mass incarceration, astrology, ancestral magic, Whitney Houston, and trusting the sacredness of your existence despite oppression and heartbreak. She lives in Minneapolis with her wife and magically aquarian, bonus-daughter.
▼LIBRECHT BAKER▼
librecht baker is the author of vetiver (Finishing Line Press), an English Professor, and a Sundress Publications' Assistant Editor. She was part of The Vagrancy’s 2018-2019 Playwrights’ Group and Eastside Queer Stories Festival 2019 and 2017. baker has attended Ragdale, VONA/Voices, and Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat. she has a MFA from Goddard College. Her poetry appears in Solace: Writing Refuge, & LGBTQ Women of Color, Bone Bouquet (Issue 8.1), Sinister Wisdom 107, and other publications. Baker's play, "Lineage Undone," was awarded Top Performance in the "Top Papers and Performances in Performance Studies" category at Western States Communication Association’s 89th Convention.
▼MIA WILLIS▼
Mia S. Willis is a Black performance poet from Charlotte, North Carolina. Their work has been featured by or is forthcoming in FreezeRay, Curating Alexandria, WORDPEACE, Peculiar, Foothill, Button Poetry, and Slamfind. Mia's poem "hecatomb." was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in Best New Poets 2018. They ranked fourth out of 96 femme poets at the 2018 Women of the World Poetry Slam, placed fifth out of 150 poets at the 2018 Southern Fried Poetry Slam, and recently became the first two-time Capturing Fire Slam Champion (2018, 2019). Mia was also named a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry as well as the 2019 Young Artist Fellow at ChaShaMa’s ChaNorth residency in Pine Plains, NY. Their debut poetry collection, monster house., was the 2018 winner of the Cave Canem Foundation’s Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and is available now with Jai-Alai Books.
▼YODASSA WILLIAMS▼
A powerful conjurer of black girl magic, Yodassa Williams is a queer femme Jamaican American writer and performing storyteller. Her AfroCarribean YA fantasy, The Goddess Twins, will be published in May 2020. An alumna of VONA, she is writing a memoir of her adventures at Burning Man. In October, she launches a wilderness writing retreat exclusively for women and non binary persons of color in Fly Ranch, Nevada.

Can you believe Sister Spit is only 15 days away?! Us either! Rounding out our GLOW Sister Spit features is Dena Rod!

Dena Rod is a writer, editor, and poet based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dena works to illuminate their diasporic experiences of Iranian American heritage and queer identity, combating negative stereotypes of their intersections in the mainstream media. Their poetry and creative nonfiction essays have appeared in the newly released My Shadow is My Skin: Voices From the Iranian Diaspora anthology, Endangered Species, Enduring Values: An Anthology of San Francisco Area Writers and Artists of Color, Forum Literary Magazine, Beyond Bloodlines (funded in part by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Argot Magazine, and Imagoes: a Queer Anthology. Catch them on Twitter @alightningrod & at denarod.com

Why do you write? What compels you to write? 
No matter how many times I've told myself I'm not a writer,  despite my best attempts at resisting an artist's path somehow it always bubbles forth in the most unexpected ways.  I've tried to ignore my creative instincts for too long and have decided to embrace the truths that are waiting to escape layers of my own suppression. I am my own worst enemy when it comes to my artistic practice but that's why it's called practice: you have to put in the minutes and hours on the page before going anywhere else. 

What upcoming writing projects are you working on? 
My project most close to completion is a poetry manuscript that writes into my imagined ancestry that has been lost to me as a result of migration called Scattered Arils. I also have a YA fantasy novel simmering on the back burner about a Iranian American girl named Asal who learns she can travel through time by walking through fire. Also on the horizon is a collection of creative nonfiction essays about my life growing up queer and Iranian American in the diaspora. 

Describe your work in five words: 
shimmering, decadent, lush, packed splendor

What are some of your artistic influences/inspirations? 
It's hard to make a definitive list of my influences, since there are so many. Tracing these threads I find the first inspiration is Audre Lorde; I wrote my MA thesis on her biomythography, Zami, and Homi Bhabha's theory of the "Third Space of Enunciation." Post-colonial theory was my first foray in disrupting Western narratives that are commonly prevalent in the English literary canon and this has molded my artistic perspective immensely in ways that I'm still discovering as a creative writer (rather than an academic one). I find myself inspired by lives and legacies of my Iranian poet foremothers, Simin Behbahani (touted as the lionness of Iran), and Forough Farrokhzad who wrote against blood spilled by their governments and revolutions. 

I'm also incredibly influenced by the magical girl genre in anime (like Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura), the fantastical stories I read as a child like Harry Potter and The Golden Compass; stories of extraordinary children who are thrust into a destiny they don't quite want but still forge ahead. I didn't necessarily see myself in these stories growing up but they were a comfort against the world I actually inhabited. I want to write the type of stories I needed when I was young. 

Kicking off 2020's GLOW Queer Artist feature is Ananya Garg! 

Ananya Garg is a South Asian lesbian, poet, and spoken word performance artist. She sees her creative practice as a community practice whether she writes in a circle or alone with her pen. Ananya has performed in Tasveer's 2018 Yoni Ki Baat, directed by Uma Rao, Tasveer's Subcontinental Drift, and Yoni Ki Baat 2018 in San Francisco at the Tenderloin Museum. She has also appeared in the University of Washington's Womxn's Action Commission's "The ____ Monologues," Lavish: A QTPOC Arts Showcase hosted by the Q Center at the University of Washington, the Viva La Healing Conference at the Ethnic Cultural Theatre, and more. She has also read at Hugo House, Gay City, and featured with YouthSpeaks Seattle, Alchemy Poetry Series, and Amplifier. Ananya has taught poetry and art through the Asian Pacific Environmental Network in the Bay Area, and worked as an educator for the Seattle Freedom Schools.
​
Why do you write? What compels you to write? 
I write for myself, my communities, and my ancestors. To quote Audre Lorde, "poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action." I write because I must. It is my survival. 

Describe your work in five words.
Raw, longing, urgent, curious, still.

Artistic influences/inspirations? 
My queer ancestors whose memories were erased by the violence of British colonialism but live on in my body. The brown queer elders in my life and the brown queer futures.

Turning the spotlight to our other Sister Spit artists, we have the magical Creatrix Tiara! You can help bring Tiara and other Sister Spitters on the road by donating to the Sister Spit fundraiser! 

Creatrix Tiara works with creative arts & media, technology, games, community cultural development, and education to explore ideas around community, identity, liminality, belonging, and social justice. Tiara is very interested in exploring the ways that various mediums can be used to convey and support experiences of transience and flux while also building empathy and understanding for experiences and stories outside one's own. In 2018 Creatrix Tiara wrote, produced, and performed in their first full-length theatre show, Queer Lady Magician, exploring stage magic through a queer, feminist, decolonial lens. Tiara also performs and produces for LGBTQIA+ disability arts collective Quippings, was a Dandy Minion and Burlesque Dancer in the 2017 Melbourne Festival production of Taylor Mac's 24 Decade History of Popular Music, produced and performed for San Francisco South Asian women's theatre program Yoni Ki Baat, and has made work across US, Australia, and elsewhere.

from the artist

Describe your work in five words. 
​
Liminal, interdisciplinary, vulnerable, passionate, curious

What are some of your artistic influences/inspirations? 

I'm a big Darren Hayes (ex Savage Garden) fangirl and he's pretty much why I'm an artist nowadays. Mama Alto is an amazing queer transfeminine non-binary POC jazz cabaret diva who also does a TON of work supporting Melbourne's queer/PoC/gender-diverse/indie artist communities - she's made SUCH a difference to my artistic career. Blake Maxam is a Bay Area-based stage magician who also does a lot of community advocacy as a queer trans woman - she's the one who got me back into stage magic and is such a sweetheart!! I'm also very influenced by the Internet and online culture - I've practically lived online since I was about 9 (as an older Millenial this was actually uncommon) and I probably wouldn't be alive, let alone thriving, without it.

What upcoming writing projects are you working on?

A lot of my writing projects nowadays aren't necessarily the traditional-publishing kind: I do a lot of work in writing for stage, games, and online media, amongst others. Amongst them, I'm working on sequel for my stage magic + storytelling + social justice show Queer Lady Magician (I'll be performing versions of the original show during Sister Spit!), playing with ideas of charm and manipulation, with the aim to produce not just a stage show but also an Alternate Reality Game narrative component around it, multidisciplinary project (writing + performance + VR +++) with a group of others from Muslim backgrounds exploring our relationships to Islam, mysticism, diaspora, Indigeneity, and identity, using archetypes like the Djinn, the Witch, and the Faerie, and a YouTube series explaining the stage magic references in the Ace Attorney games! 

This month we're shining our feature spotlight to our Sister Spit artists who will hit the road in SPRING 2020!  

Mia S. Willis is a Black non-binary poet whose work has been featured by or is forthcoming in The New Southern Fugitives, FreezeRay, Narrative Northeast, Peculiar, Slamfind, and others. In 2019, Mia was named the first two-time Capturing Fire Slam Champion, a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, the Young Artist Fellow at Chashama’s ChaNorth residency, and a collaborator in Forward Together’s Transgender Day of Resilience Art Project (tdor.co). Their debut poetry collection, monster house., was the 2018 winner of the Cave Canem Foundation’s Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and is available with Jai-Alai Books. Connect with Mia on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram: @poetinthehat.

from the artist

Why do you write? What compels you to write?

I write because silence is antithetical to the survival of my kinfolk. 

Describe your work in five words. 

Block party in a graveyard. 

What are some of your artistic influences/inspirations? 

The heady welcome of crab boil. A hallowed dancehall beat. Shit-talking across the spades table. Ashlee Haze. Imani Davis. Asia Bryant-Wilkerson. Ariana Brown. Lindsay Young. The metallic hum of hair clippers. A perfectly rolled blunt. My families, chosen and given. 

What upcoming writing projects are you working on?

My first full-length poetry collection is nearing completion, so I am currently balancing its final revisions with background research for a new heroic crown of sonnets about my socio-cultural acquisition and embodiment of masculinity as a Black queer person. 

Corey Qureshi is a queer writer and musician based in Philadelphia. They work at an LGBTQ+ center and give drum lessons. When they aren't working or making things, they're busy being a young parent and loving it. They're Blue Stoop alumni and read flash fiction for Homology Lit. Find a list of published work at neutralspaces.co/q_boxo. Follow them on twitter @q_boxo.

from the artist

Why do you write? What compels you to write?

I've always loved books and've wanted to write one since I was a kid. Sometimes, I really want to talk about the thousands of small moments and things we feel but don't notice daily. Other times I write to bring awareness to the discomforts of working for unlivable wages. It's never easy being the only queer and/or nonwhite person in a space where you're forced to serve and please consumers (largely my experience). I want others in these circumstances to feel seen, cause most of the time we're just shamed for admitting it's a struggle. Also love, always love.