Sister Spit Tour 2018: QTPOC Cruising the West

Monday, March 12, 7-10pm
Presented by Radar Productions
30 Participants maximum
$16 Members / $20 Regular

Member price accessed with discount code at checkout. Are you a member and don’t know your code? Email [email protected]! Not a member but interested in these perks? Join here!

In 2018 the Sister Spit Tour celebrates its 21st anniversary touring the United States with 7 remarkable writers and multi-disciplinary artists. The 2018 tour — “QTPOC Cruising the West” — marks a new chapter in the tour’s history, as Radar Productions (the non-profit that houses Sister Spit) has shifted its vision toward developing queer and trans artists of color (QTPOC).

The tour began in San Francisco in the 1990s as a weekly, girls-only open mic that was an alternative to the misogyny-soaked poetry open mics popular around the city at that time. Sister Spit became the first all-girl poetry roadshow at the end of the 90s, and toured regularly with such folks as Eileen Myles, Beth Lisick and Nomy Lamm. Sister Spit will tour the West Coast and Southwest March 2-15, 2018, featuring MariNaomi, Wo Chan, Jay Dodd, Juliana Delgado Lopera, Andrea Abi-Karam, Jamal Lewis and Virgie Tovar — each offers intersectional perspectives on issues of race, size, class, gender and sexuality.

Featured Writers & Artists

Jamal T. Lewis (b. 1990) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist, writer, and thought leader living in Bedstuy, Brooklyn, hailing from Atlanta, Georgia. Named by Teen Vogue as one of the “coolest queers on the internet,” Lewis is also known as ‘fatfemme’, a moniker that encapsulates life at the intersection of fat and femme identity — “spaces that people are afraid to occupy,” he-she names. A graduate of Morehouse College and The New School, Lewis produces work around the body, specifically exploring and interrogating identity formation, race, gender, sexuality, desire, beauty, and ugliness. Lewis’s work has been featured in LA Times, New York Times, TriBeca, & Tate Modern.

MariNaomi is the award-winning author and illustrator of four graphic memoirs, and an upcoming YA graphic novel trilogy, Life on Earth. Her work has appeared in over sixty print publications and has been featured on numerous websites, including The Rumpus, LA Review of Books, Midnight Breakfast, and BuzzFeed. Mari’s comics and paintings have been featured by such institutions as the Smithsonian, the de Young Museum, the Cartoon Art Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and the Japanese American Museum. Mari first toured with Sister Spit in 2011. She’s the founder and administrator of the Cartoonists of Color and Queer Cartoonists databases, and cohost of the Ask Bi Grlz podcast with Myriam Gurba.

Andrea Abi-Karam is a genderqueer punk poet cyborg writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies & delayed healing. Their first book EXTRATRANSMISSION is forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press early 2018. Commune Editions published Andrea’s chapbook THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions, 2016) an attempt to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Andrea is both a writer, printer & publisher whose founding small press project Mess Editions seeks to publish emerging writing from queers, people of color, & those involved in social movements yet uninvolved in poetry & art scenes.

Born in Macau, Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. They have received fellowships from the NYFA, Kundiman, Asian American Writers Workshop, and Lambda Literary, and have performed at venues including National Sawdust, Dixon Place, and New York Live Arts. Wo is a standing member of the Brooklyn based drag/burlesque collective Switch n’ Play and is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU.

Virgie Tovar is an author, activist and one of the nation’s leading experts and lecturers on fat discrimination and body image. She is the founder of Babecamp, a 4-week online course designed to help those who are ready to break up with diet culture, and started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight. Tovar edited the ground-breaking anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012). Her new book of non-fiction, You Have The Right to Remain Fat will be released from the Feminist Press in August 2018. She holds a Master’s degree in Human Sexuality with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. After teaching “Female Sexuality” at the University of California at Berkeley, where she completed a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science in 2005, she went onto host “The Virgie Show” (CBS Radio) in San Francisco. She is a former plus size style writer for BuzzFeed. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, MTV, Al Jazeera, NPR, Yahoo Health, the San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan Magazine Online, and Bust Magazine.

jayy dodd is a blxk trans femme from los angeles, california– now based on the internet. they are a professional writer & literary editor. their work has appeared / will appear in Broadly, The Establishment, Entropy, LitHub, BOAAT Press, Duende, & Nashville Review among others. they’re the author of [sugar in the tank] (Pizza Pi Press 2016) & Mannish Tongues (Platypus Press 2017). their collection The Black Condition ft. Narcissus is forthcoming on Siren Song / CCM Press. they are a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-editor of Bettering American Poetry. their work has been featured in Teen Vogue, LA Review of Books & Entropy. find them talking trash online or taking a selfie.

Juliana Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer/educator/oral-historian based in San Francisco. The recipient of the 2014 Jackson Literary award, and a finalist of the Clark-Gross Novel award, she’s the author of ¡Cuéntamelo! an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latin@ immigrants awarded the Regen Ginaa Grant from Galería de la Raza and a 2014 National Queer Arts Festival Grant from the Queer Cultural Center. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Four Way Review, The Bold Italic, Weird Sister, Revista Canto, Transfer Magazine, Raspa Magazine, Black Girl Dangerous, and SF Weekly among others. She’s performed in countless venues around the West Coast and lectured at San Francisco State University, Wayward Writers and 826 Valencia. She’s the executive director of RADAR Productions.

*All members get 20% off paid programming. A limited number of free spots are also available for Warrior & Goddess level members. Email [email protected] to inquire about free tickets.

Our program costs go directly towards compensation of the instructors and staffers who work the event. We want to make programming as accessible as possible to anyone who is interested, however, so we offer volunteer opportunities in exchange for membership, as well as free community tickets to each program (number varies depending on capacity of the class). Email [email protected] for more info or to find out more about these opportunities for a specific event.