Saints and Sinners Fest Queer AF Reading

This special event pairs local and out-of-town writers from all writing stages and genres. This year, we are thrilled to announce that our featured readers are Rickey Laurentiis, Brad Richard, Chin-Sun Lee, Casey Dawson, Ben Fluet, who will be reading alongside five out-of-town writers. Open mic to follow, and sign ups will be first come, first served. There will be booze, there will be panache, there will be an afterparty!
Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to care. Her debut book, Boy with Thorn, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and finalized for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. They’ve partnered with the Carnegie Museum of Art and lead a conversation at the Museum of Modern Art. Fellowships from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem and the Whiting Foundation have honored her, and she was inaugural fellow at Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. Her much anticipated second collection, Death of the First Idea, was published in 2025 by Knopf and longlisted for the National Book Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a nominee for a NAACP Image Award.
Brad Richard is the author of Habitations (Portals Press, 2000), Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011), Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012), Parasite Kingdom (The Word Works, 2019), and Turned Earth (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). His 2022 chapbook, In Place, was chosen for the Robin Becker Series from Seven Kitchens Press. A second edition of Motion Studies, with additional poems and a foreword by Skye Jackson, was published by The Word Works in March, 2025. He has taught creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, The Willow School (whose creative writing program he founded and directed), Louisiana State University, and Tulane University, and for The Kenyon Review and New Orleans Writers Workshop. Series editor of the Hilary Tham Capital Collection from The Word Works, he lives, writes, and gardens in New Orleans.
Ben Fluet is a queer poet and filmmaker living in New Orleans. He is currently the Graduate Editor at University of New Orleans Press and a reader for Bayou Magazine. In 2022, he hand-bound and self-published his debut chapbook, How We Forgot to Sing. In 2020, Ben directed Meet Me By The Magnolia Tree, a documentary exploring the history of gay men's lives in Richmond, VA, which aired on PBS and featured on Virginia Public Media. His recent writing appears or is forthcoming in the Tilted House Slender Broadside series, Otis Nebula, Trampoline, and NeoSolarZine.
Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (Unnamed Press 2023) and the forthcoming Soon You’ll Be Just Like Us (Creature Publishing 2027). She’s a contributor to the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2014). Her work has also appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Georgia Review, and Joyland, among other publications. She writes, edits, and teaches in New Orleans. www.chinsunlee.com
Casey Dawson is an occasional writer and full time pool boy at the vampire mansion from New Orleans. You can follow them on Letterboxd at @caseylikekc. You cannot follow them into the void. (Get your own.)

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