deposition | dispossession: Book Launch + Reading

Join us on Friday, September 24, 2021 at 6pm (PST) to celebrate the release of deposition | dispossession: Climate Change in the Sundarbans, the posthumously published work by Marthe Reed. deposition | dispossession (with an introduction by Angela Hume), responds to the ecological crises of the Sundarbans of south Bangladesh and India. The work “talks back” to climate denialism, questioning Reed’s own and the United States’ role in climate change and its collateral damage.

This virtual event will feature contributions by Laura Mullen, Angela Hume, Bhanu Kapil, Kimberly Alidio, Mark Lamoureux, Anastacia-Reneé, and others.

Click here to register and receive Zoom log-in information.

QTBIPOC Book Contest Finalists

A big thank you to all writers that submitted manuscripts to Kelsey Street Press’s first QTBIPOC prize. We are overjoyed to have read so many compelling and subversive submissions.

Kelsey Street’s editorial team had a difficult time narrowing down the 120+ submissions to the final seven, which speaks to the quality of all the work submitted. Indeed, Metta Sáma, this year’s judge, has much to deliberate.

We wish the following seven finalists much luck and look forward to announcing a winner of the prize in the coming weeks.

jayy dodd, Getting Hungry

Jai Dulani, Language We Fall Through

Mihee Kim, Nomenclature

Vuyelwa Maluleke, Falling Towards the Centre

Ansley Moon, Register the Missing

Maggie Rhee-Reclamation or My Body Instead

Ximena Keogh Serrano, The Glow in Our Spilling

Kelsey Street Press' QTBIPOC Contest is a free book contest open to a QTBIPOC-identified feminist, innovative writer/poet. The winning manuscript will be chosen by Metta Sáma, author of Swing at your own risk (Kelsey Street Press, 2019). The prize winner will receive publication along with a $1,000.00 cash award to help aid in book promotion, travel, event attendance, and a general contribution to the hopes of thriving as an artist. Along with book publication and cash prize, Ching-in Chen, winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Poetry for recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017), will serve as editor along with a Kelsey Street Press collective member.

Renee Gladman & Metta Sáma Reading, August 28th, 5pm PST

Please join Kelsey Street Press authors Renee Gladman and Metta Sáma for a reading on Saturday, August 28th at 5pm PST. In a time of dislocation, Renee Gladman and Metta Sáma tackle linguistic risks through form, language, and subject from one lyric utterance to the next to the next to reveal that like Gladman’s Ravicka, we too are “all dislocated and queer, strangers in a strange land—alien to others and, even, to ourselves.”

RSVP for the reading.

Metta Sáma's Swing at your own risk (Kelsey Street Press, 2019) swings from one subject to the next, from one lyric utterance to the next, concerning itself with unpacking myths of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. "Sáma's poems are visionary manifestos of the body boiled in Black Woman bloodline," Tyehimba Jess.

Metta Sáma is author of four poetry chapbooks, most recently, the year we turned dragon (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs), and two full-length poetry collections, most recently, Swing at your own risk (Kelsey Street Press). An award-winning poet, her poems, fiction, CNF, literary scholarship & book reviews have been published in various literary journals and anthologies. Sáma is the founder of Artists Against Police Brutality/Cultures of Violence, a Senior Fellow of Black Earth Institute and a member of the Advisory Board of Black Radish Books.

Renee Gladman's Kelsey Street Press books include Newcomer Can't Swim in 2007 and Juice, her first full-length book, in 2000.

Gladman is preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of thirteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013) and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—as well as two collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017) and One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper's, BOMB magazine, e-flux and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and is a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

Renee Gladman

Metta Sáma