Join poet and scholar Karen Jaime and scholar Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails, for a conversation about queerness, poetry and performance, and Jaime’s new book The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida. From its founding in the early 1970s to the present, there is a long tradition of queerness—both in terms of sexualities and performance practices—at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Jaime’s book traces this history and recognizes the work of many of these queer artists, including Regie Cabico and Andres Chulisi Rodriguez who will perform and discuss their work.

Join this event in-person at the Bureau

OR watch the live-stream of the event on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzrAvfZMDF_ilmUH0CBn5iA

Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.

All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.

We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register

Safety protocol (for those joining in person):

In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:

If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.

Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Purchase Karen Jaime’s The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (NYU, 2021, paperback, $28) from the Bureau’s online store by clicking on the title.

Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Copies of The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida are also available at the Bureau’s physical store.

Karen Jaime is Assistant Professor of Performing and Media Arts and Latina/o Studies at Cornell University. Karen is a former Institute for Citizens & Scholars Career Enhancement Junior Faculty Fellow (*formerly the Woodrow Wilson), Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a former Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellow and Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Karen’s monograph, The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (NYU Press, 2021) argues for a reexamination of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe as a historically queer space, both in terms of sexualities and performance practices. Her critical writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, e-Misférica, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, ASAP/J, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and in Performance Matters. Karen is also an accomplished spoken word/performance artist who served as the host/curator of the Friday Night Poetry Slam at the world-renowned Nuyorican Poets Cafe (2003-2005). As a published poet, her writing is included in The Best of Panic! En Vivo From the East Village, Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, in a special issue of Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal, “Out Latina Lesbians,” and in the anthology Latinas: Struggles and Protest in 21st Century USA.

Arnaldo M. Cruz-Malavé is professor of Spanish and comparative literature and associate director of Fordham’s Latin American and Latinx Studies Institute. He is the author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (Palgrave, 2007), a book about the relationship between art and Latinx popular culture in the gentrifying New York of the 1980s; El primitivo implorante (Rodopi, 1994), a study of the intersections of nationalism and queer sexuality in the prose fiction of the Cuban author José Lezama Lima; editor of the anthology of short stories by the Puerto Rican queer diasporic author, Manuel Ramos Otero: Cuentos (casi) completos (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2019) and coeditor, with Martin Manalansan, of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (NYU, 2002). He has been the recipient of the NEH and the Ford Foundation fellowships, a visiting professor at Harvard, and a former member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of CUNY’s Graduate Center and Fordham University Press.

Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam and later taking top prizes in three National Poetry Slams. Mr. Cabico received his BFA at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is a 2006 NYU Asian Pacific American Studies Artist In Residence. Television credits include 2 seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, NPR’s Snap Judgement & a TEDx Talk. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Mr. Cabico received the 2006 Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers for his work teaching at-risk youth at Bellevue Hospital. As a theater artist, he received three New York Innovative Theater Award Nominations for his work in Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind with a win for Best Performance Art Production. Mr. Cabico will be a featured poet at the 2022 Whitney Biennial and resides in Washington, DC where he produces Capturing Fire Press and Capturing Fire Slam.

Andres Chulisi Rodriguez is a poet, author, writer and actor. Brooklyn born Harlem living. Working on 2nd book and 4th One Man Show- Prototype Of An Unmothered Maricon.