Playwright Azure D. Osborne-Lee and Author and Poet Ashley Young present an evening of works-in-progress highlighting the experiences of Queer Black characters in fiction and non-fiction narratives. Join them in sharing the development of their work and celebrate their contributions to the queer community as writers of color.

Suggested donation of $10 to benefit the Bureau and the readers. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Azure D. Osborne-Lee is an award-winning writer and theatre maker from South of the Mason-Dixon Line. He earns a living working as an arts administrator, and lives in Brooklyn with one small cat named Cream Cheez and one flamboyant fish named Lucius.

Azure holds an M.A. in Advanced Theatre Practice from Royal Central School of Speech & Drama (2011), where he studied site-specific, experimental, and collaborative theatre. Azure also holds an M.A. in Women’s & Gender Studies (2008) and a B.A. in English & Spanish (2005) from The University of Texas at Austin.

Azure is an inaugural Field Leadership Fund Arts Manager Fellow (2015-2017) as well as a Lambda Literary Fellow in Playwriting (2015 & 2016). He is an alumnus of The Fire This Time Festival (2015), Rising Circle Theater Collective’s INKtank (2014), and EMERGENYC, the Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program (2014).

Azure has held playwriting residences with Brooklyn Community Pride Center (2015), New Shoes Theatre (2011), and Freedom Train Productions (2010). He was recently awarded the 2015 Mario Fratti-Fred Newman Political Play Award for his first full-length play “Mirrors,” and has been a finalist for the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and The I Am Soul Playwright’s Residency at National Black Theatre as well as a semifinalist for Ars Nova’s Play Group and New York Theatre Workshop’s Emerging Artists Fellowship.

Azure’s short play “The Sandbox” has been published in Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy as well as the forthcoming anthology Emerge: 2015 Lambda Literary Fellows Anthology. Azure has written multiple articles for HowlRound.com on gender and theatre, and his short plays “Vector: Episode One” and “Vector: Episode Two” were produced at The Flea Theater as part of #serials@theflea this past December.

Azure has recently performed at BRIC, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), HERE Arts Center, and BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange. In the past year he has presented his writing at Fire & Ink IV: Witness, and has been invited to participate in panels at The Black Lavender Experience 2016 at Brown University and Bodies at Work: Performance, Labor, and ATHE, the upcoming Association for Theatre in Higher Education 2016 Conference.

Azure has a number of engagements this summer, including a reading at National Black Theatre on June 13th. You can keep up with Azure’s work at https://azureosbornelee.com. You can donate to Azure’s Lambda Literary Retreat Fundraiser at https://lambdaliterary.donorpages.com/WritersRetreat2016/AzureOsborneLee/.

Ashley Young is a Queer feminist poet, author and teacher. Her work has been published in three anthologies, Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press), All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (University of Wisconsin Press) and Glitter and Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy (Portland Studio). She a contributor at Elixher magazine and has been featured in various online magazines, such as Autostraddle, Rvkvry Journal and more. She is a 2010 Voices of Our Nation’s Foundation Poetry Fellow and a 2011 Lambda Literary Foundation Nonfiction Fellow, to return summer of 2016. She has taught her biomythography workshop at the Fire and Ink Conference in 2015 and at the Northeast Queer and Trans Conference at NYU. She performs her work at various readings throughout the country and will be reading at her first solo show at Bluestockings Bookstore, Cafe and Activist Center in New York City. She is currently working on a collection of poetry and prose entitled Chronicles of Bipolar Living and is completing her first novel, a biomythography entitled The Liberation of the Black Unicorn. Ashley lives in New York City with her wife, four wild cats and her sweet service dog.