BGSQDBureau of General Services—Queer Division
BGSQD
Queer poetry extravaganza with Jasmine Gibson, Andrea Abi-Karam, NM Esc, Che Gosset & Melissa Buzzeo slinging feelings & slaying language.
Che Gossett is Black trans femme writer and para academic theory queen. They are the recipient of the 2014 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association and the 2014 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York. They have published work on blackness and animality on the Verso Press blog and have also contributed to Queer Necropolitics, The Trans Studies Reader Volume II, Captive Genders and forthcoming anthologies.
Melissa Buzzeo‘s fourth book The Devastation published by Nightboat Books was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in Poetry in 2016. She teaches feminism, the poetics of healing and poetry and sexuality at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Currently she is working on a memoir called Writing.
Andrea Abi-Karam is a mixed race genderqueer punk poet writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. They recently completed the manuscript EXTRATRANSMISSION a book length piece against how patriarchy and US militarism produce the hypergendered subject. Andrea is both a writer, printer, & publisher whose founding small press project Mess Editions seeks to publish emerging writing from queers, people of color, and those involved in social movements yet uninvolved in poetry & art scenes.
NM Esc is a first-generation New York-grown brain-in-a-jar, floating in viscous queer soup. They write about how displacement shapes identity, dissociation and hyper-embodiment, cyborgs and ghosts, intimacy and technology. Between Ghosts, their latest chapbook and fourth project in their Reno Dakota series, co-written with SJ Lee, is available through Mess Editions. They recently completed a residency at Villa Magdalena K where they’ve been working on a project about wolf semiotics. In their day-to-day they’re a collective member at all-ages art space The Silent Barn where they organize events and cohost a monthly reading series called TFW.
Jasmine Gibson is a Philly jawn now living in Brooklyn and soon to be psychotherapist for all your gooey psychotic episodes that match the bipolar flows of capital. She spends her time thinking about sexy things like psychosis, desire and freedom. She has written for Mask Magazine and LIES Vol II: Journal of Materialist feminism and has now published a chapbook, Drapetomania, off of Commune Editions.