Ballads at Battery Park City: Queer Delight and Desire

Join us at Rector Park on June 1st at 7 PM ET where the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Battery Park City present In Celebration: Queer Delight and Desire, the second installment of our summer poetry series, Ballads at Battery Park City.

This event will be a reading with a conversation with our poets on their ruminations and thoughts on love, love, queer and otherwise. The dream lineup will feature Wo Chan, Jasmine Reid, Xan Forest Phillips, and Devyn Manibo.

RSVP HERE!

From May through July 2023, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Battery Park City present an outdoor summer poetry reading and discussion series under the theme of “love”: declarations of love, rejections of love, self-love, romantic love, familial and platonic love, and the multitudes of the way love glimmers through our experiences.

Wo Chan who performs as The Illustrious Pearl is a poet and drag artist. They are the author of TOGETHERNESS (Nightboat 2022) which received the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award in Trans and Gender Variant Literature. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.

Jasmine Reid is a twice trans poet of flowers. She is the author of Deus Ex Nigrum, winner of the 2018 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest, selected by Danez Smith. An MFA graduate from Cornell University and recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Poets House, and Jack Jones Literary Arts, her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Indiana Review, Pinwheel, TriQuarterly, and Washington Square Review, among others. Jasmine was born and raised in Baltimore, MD, and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY, where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute.

Xan Forest Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. He is the author of the poetry collection Hull (2019), winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Trans Poetry, and the chapbook Reasons for Smoking (2018), selected by Claudia Rankine for the Seattle Review Chapbook Contest. The recipient of a Whiting Award and The Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, Xan has received fellowships from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Xan’s poetry is featured in Berlin Quarterly Review, Bomb Magazine, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Devyn Mañibo is a Jersey-bred maker, feeder, and poet. She was a 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar in poetry and has had work presented and published internationally. She is the Deputy Director of Asian American Writers' Workshop and holds an MFA in Performance & Performance Studies from SAIC. She bakes cakes with her wife in Brooklyn.

//ACCESSIBILITY//

This event will be outdoors. Masks are highly encouraged. We keep each other safe.

Event Image Description: A pastel iridescent background with soft pink shapes and a periwinkle curved line. In royal blue bold text, the graphic reads AAWW & BATTERY PARK CITY AUTHORITY PRESENT BALLADS IN BATTER PARK CITY: IN CELEBRATION OF QUEER DELIGHT AND DESIRE WITH WO CHAN, DEVYN MAÑIBO, XAN FOREST PHILLIPS, & JASMINE REID. JUNE 1, 7PM ET, IN-PERSON AT RECTOR PARK EAST, MASKS HIGHLY ENCOURAGED, RSVP AT AAWW.ORG/EVENTS. The graphic includes four portraits of queer and trans poets: Wo Chan, who is in drag as The Illustrious Pearl, wearing a large white hat embellished with rhinestones, sequins, and beads. Their hair is straight and black with a bangs and a blunt cut. They are wearing circular earrings and smiling with lipstick and their hand over their chest; Devyn Mañibo, who has her hair puled back in a curly ponytail. She is wearing metal framed glasses and is smiling wide into the sun with her eyes quinting. She is wearing a lavender jacket, a black shirt, and a gold chain; Xan Forest Phillips, a Black trans poet wearing a black baseball cap. His hair is bleached. He is smiling slightly with dimples. He is wearing a beige shirt and a chain; Jasmine Reid,a Black femme poet with beautiful curly bangs. She is looking at the camera with her mouth pursed. The sun is shining and obscuring part of her face. She is wearing a red leather jacket. The bottom of the graphic features the AAWW logo in bold black print. It is next to a graphic of the shape of New York and reads "New York State of Opportunity. Battery Park City Authority"

Event Venue

Rector Park, Rector Place, New York, United States