Monster Beauties: A Maine Transgender Poetry Anthology book launch party

Trans Poetics Archive presents Monster Beauties: A Maine Transgender Poetry Anthology Book Launch hosted by the 7th Portland Poet Laureate, Maya Williams featuring a Trans Poetics Showcase and keynote speaker, Ian-Khara Ellasante, PhD. The anthology was funded by USM's GRO Scholarship and a USM IDEC mini-grant and features poems by twenty-three Maine-affiliated trans and non-binary poets.

Ian-Khara Ellasante (they/them) is a Black, queer, trans-nonbinary poet and cultural studies scholar. Ian-Khara’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, The Feminist Wire, Nat, Brut, Hinchas de Poesia, The Volta, Writing the Land: Maine, and From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Writers Write the Northeast. Ian-Khara is a 2023 Cave Canem Fellow and has received the New Millennium Award for Poetry and the Ashley Bryan Fellowship. Their critical writing, including the essay “Radical Sovereignty, Rhetorical Borders, and the Everyday Decolonial Praxis of Indigenous Peoplehood and Two-Spirit Reclamation,” has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Families in Society. Ian-Khara is a Point Foundation Scholar and an alum of the University of Memphis (BA) and the University of Arizona (MA and PhD). Proudly hailing from Memphis, Ian-Khara has also loved living and writing in Tucson, Brooklyn and most recently, southern Maine, where they are an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College.

Maya Williams (ey/em, they/them, and she/her) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently an Ashley Bryan Fellow and was selected as the seventh Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine for a July 2021 to July 2024 term. Maya's debut poetry collection, Judas & Suicide, is available through Game Over Books . Eir second poetry collection, Refused a Second Date, is available now through Harbor Editions. Maya's third poetry collection, a chapbook: What's So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway? , is available now via Garden Party Collective. Maya's collections are a finalist of a New England Book Award, a finalist of a Maine Literary Award, and a winner of Garden Party Collective's chapbook contest respectively. She graduated with a Bachelors in Social Work and a Bachelors of Art in English in May 2017. She graduated with a community practice-focused Masters in Social Work and Certificate in Applied Arts and Social Justice at the University of New England in May 2018. She graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts for Creative Writing with a Focus in Poetry at Randolph College in June 2022. They have featured as a guest artist, panelist, and speaker in spaces such as The Mixed Remixed Festival in Los Angeles, California, The Interfaith Leadership Institute in Chicago, Illinois, Black Table Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota, TEDxYouth at Cape Elizabeth High School, and The Kennedy Center's Arts Across America series. Ey has competed locally and nationally in slam poetry since her freshman year at East Carolina University under the slam team Word of Mouth in Greenville, North Carolina. While with them, ey placed in the top 20 at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI) in 2015, and opened for folks such as Indira Allegra, Neil Hilborn, and Angela Davis. They were a finalist of the Slam Free Or Die Qualifier Slam for their National Poetry Slam (NPS) 2018 team and a runner up of the Slam Free or Die Individual Slam Championship in 2018. They were also a recipient of the Maine Humanities Council's Constance Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2024.

t love smith (they/them) is a queer poet stewarding unceded Wabanaki land, a graduate student at Stonecoast MFA, a Publications Intern at The Telling Room and a Content Creator/Podcaster at WMPG. As a GRO Scholar, t is curating a series of events for their Trans Poetics Archive project which will culminate Spring 2025 with the publication of Monster Beauties: A Maine Transgender Poetry Anthology. t represented Portland, Maine at several NPS competitions and twice opened for the Grammy-award winning singer/songwriter and poet, Mary Lambert. t’s poetry has been published in new words press vol. 3, Island Ink issue 2, Oddball Magazine, the Free Press, as well as presented on local radio podcasts: Transgender Poetics on WMPG and Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio.

Trans Poetics Showcase Poetry Readers:

Jude Marx - 2025 Grand Prize Winner anthology contest

Hale Linnet

Lukcia Sullivan

Leo Eichfeld

River Martin

Sampson Spadafore

Jae Casella

Kyle Suthowski

Ben Cates

Calla Eris Orion

Eben Thomas

elm root

Prophett

Host or Publisher SPACE