Celebrate an evening of poetry with queer poets Ruben Quesada (Brutal Companion), Emanuel Xavier (Love(ly) Child), Rosebud Ben-Oni (If This is the Age We End Discovery), and Jan Beatty (Dragstripping) in conversation about their latest work.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, room 210 of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:

youtube.com/@bgsqd

Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.

All are welcome to attend, with or without a 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 or on Venmo @BGSQD

Ruben Quesada is the editor of the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. His poetry and criticism appear in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, Lambda Literary Review, Harvard Review and elsewhere. He has served as poetry editor for AGNI, Poet Lore, Pleiades, Tab Journal, and as a poetry blogger for The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. He currently teaches as Affiliate Faculty in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Emanuel Xavier is author of the poetry books Pier Queen, Americano, If Jesus Were Gay, Nefarious, Radiance, Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier, and Love(ly) Child. He is recipient of a New York City Council Citation and a Gay City Impact Award for his many contributions to NYC arts culture. His books have been finalists for International Latino Book Awards and Lambda Literary Awards and his work has appeared in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology,  Poetry, A Gathering of the Tribes, Hanging Loose Press, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is on the Board of The Publishing Triangle. www.emanuelxavier.org

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace” for a national media campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, and her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11th Memorial. She performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day, as part “We Are Here: Songs from The Holocaust.” Most recently, her poem “When You Are the Arrow of Time” was commissioned and filmed by the Museum of Jewish Heritage— A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full-length collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020), which she began in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday in 2019. She has received grants from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, Queens Council for the Arts and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Wales, Poetry Daily, Tin House, among others.

Jan Beatty’s eighth book, Dragstripping, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, September, 2024. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. Recent books include The Body Wars and a chapbook, Skydog (Lefty Blondie Press, 2022). Other work includes Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2018 Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She is Professor Emerita at Carlow University, where she directed creative writing, the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the MFA program. www.janbeatty.com