Queer Geographies: Poetics of Identity and Place

Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is a multimedia artist, activist/organizer, critic, and educator. A Tulsa Artist Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he is author of the poetry/photography collections, Archipiélagos; Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking; and South Bronx Breathing Lessons. Bodhrán is editor of the international queer Indigenous issue of Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought; and co-editor of the Native dance/movement/performance issue of Movement Research Performance Journal. His visual art is exhibited in New York, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. His films have been shared in the U.S. and Australia. He continually works with Indigenous, womanist, and queer/trans communities of color to create compelling multimedia dance works. He organized an international womanist/queer/trans Indigenous roundtable dialogue on issues of water for Hawai‘i Review. Co-founder of the world’s first transgender film festival, he organized the first transgender people of color panel at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference & Bookfair; and the world’s first transgender Arab roundtable dialogue for Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary & Art Journal. Among Arab publications, his work appears in Lebanon in Rusted Radishes; in Morocco in Gallimaufry; in the U.S. in Mizna; A Different Path: An Anthology of the Radius of Arab American Writers; and Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry; and in Canada in El Ghourabaa: A Queer and Trans Arab and Arabophone Anthology. He has received scholarships/fellowships from CantoMundo, Macondo, Radius of Arab American Writers, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, and Lambda Literary.

Photo Credit: Melissa Lukenbaugh & Tulsa Artist Fellowship. 

Educator, feminist activist, and lover of cats, bears, and other wild beings, Joe Kadi has written Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker (South End Press, 1996) and edited the anthology Food For Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists (South End Press, 1994). He also writes regularly for Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America and has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies, and Arc Poetry Magazine. He teaches in the Gender and Sexuality Studies program at University of Calgary. 

A transgender/queer, disabled Arab-Canadian/SWANA man, Joe lives, with gratitude and love for the land, in the ancestral and contemporary homelands of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. This region includes the Blackfoot Confederacy (the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai First Nations), as well as the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda, comprising the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations. The City of Calgary is also home to Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3.