BESPOKE: Post-Pride Edition. Get your rainbow raiments ready! (Be sure to roll those r’s while doing so.) It’s time, as Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, to “jazz June!” On Thursday, June 28 the Bureau will feature Dreya St. Clair, Alejandro Morales, and Thomas March at Bespoke, a bimonthly queer series where featured readers dress fun, fancy, or flirtatious, while supporting the Bureau and resisting fascism. Our sinfully sartorial series presents fashionable femmes, dapper dykes, chic twinks, trendy trans* folk, & frothy FTMs. Featured writers are encouraged to suit up or dress down : readers’ choice.
 
Open mic readers: whose name shall be drawn from the rainbow top hat this month? General attendees: which incredible edibles from Dylan’s Candy Bar will find their way to the insatiate maws of our deviant demimonde?
 
Your hosts are the sinfully sartorial trio Christina “CQ” Quintana (writer/ playwright/ dyke about town), Tim Murphy (longtime LGBTQ journalist, activist and author of the novel Christodora), Jerome Ellison Murphy (poet, critic and NYU Creative Writing Program administrator) who invite you to turn out in your Thursday best (dressing up is welcome & encouraged, not mandatory) every other month for drinks and chat before & after our reading.
 

 
 
Dréya St. Clair is an interdisciplinary, Jamaican-born, transgender woman actor, artist, writer, activist and nonprofit fundraising professional. She holds an Honors B.A. in Sexuality and Society from Brown University, an MA and MFA, respectively in Performance Studies from New York Univeristy/Tisch School of the Arts and in Acting from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Her visual art has been seen in museums, NYC galleries and in permanent exhibits and collections.

St. Clair has performed on regional and off-Broadway stages, in film and video and is SAG-AFTRA eligible.

She is based in New York, NY. Reach her on Twitter and Instagram @DreyaStClair

Originally from Springfield, IL, Thomas March is a poet, teacher and critic based in New York City. His poetry has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Good Men Project, Pleiades, and Public Pool, among others. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Believer, The Huffington Post, and New Letters. Appearing regularly in Lambda Literary Review, his poetry column, “Appreciations,” offers appreciative close readings of excellent poems from recent collections by LGBTQ poets. A past recipient of the Norma Millay Ellis Fellowship in Poetry, from the Millay Colony for the Arts, he has also received an Artist/Writer grant from The Vermont Studio Center. In recent years, he has written and performed monologues at a number of venues in New York City, including Ars Nova, Joe’s Pub, The Peoples Improv Theater, and Sid Gold’s Request Room. Aftermath, his first poetry collection, was selected by Joan Larkin for The Word Works Hilary Tham Capital Collection.

A former playwright, Alejandro Morales’s plays have been presented and developed at theaters such as INTAR, South Coast Repertory, HERE Arts Center, Mabou Mines and The Public Theater, where he was a 2008 Emerging Writer. He is the recipient of a Van Lier Fellowship, the Whitfield Cook Award and an Overall Achievement Award from the New York International Fringe Festival for his play expat/inferno. His plays have been published by NoPassport Press and excerpts from his first novel The Furies of Hialeah have been published in ImageOut Write and Callisto. He was also a runner up for litrejections.com’s Story Prize. He is an alumnus of New Dramatists and a former Co-Artistic Director of Packawallop Productions, an independent theater company he cofounded and helped run for 20 years. He is currently at work on his second novel.