Host Publications Presents: A Queer Poetry Reading at Poets House

✦ Host Publications is honored to present A Queer Poetry Reading and Celebration featuring performances by queer poets and finalists for the LGBTQ+ Poetry Lammy’s: Eli Claire, jason b crawford, Qurat Dar, Joshua Garcia, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, and Stacey Waite. Giveaways, light refreshments, and poetic ecstasy ensue! Hosted by Annar Veröld-Miranda.
✦ Free & open to all lovers of literature.

Featured Readers:

White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare lives near Lake Champlain in unceded Abenaki territory (also known as Vermont) where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written two books of essays, the award-winning Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. His newest book is the mixed genre volume Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming Additionally he has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies. Eli works as a traveling poet, storyteller, and social justice educator. Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace and helped organize the first ever Queer Disability Conference.

jason b crawford is a queer poet. They are the author of YEET! (Omnidawn, 2025), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Poetry, and Year of the Unicorn Kidz (Sundress Publications, 2022). A Lambda Literary Fellow, crawford was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Lansing, Michigan.

Qurat Dar is the author of Non-Prophet (icehouse poetry 2025), winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize and a current finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. She was the City of Mississauga’s Youth Poet Laureate from 2021-2023 and the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam National Champion. Qurat’s poems have appeared in Augur, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, and across the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) network.

Joshua Garcia is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Thom Gunn Award. His poems have appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University, an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project, and support from the Hawthornden Foundation. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. Their books include The Inheritance of Haunting, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, Wayward Creatures, and Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; and poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal and currently live in southern California.

Stacey Waite is the author of five poetry collections: Choke (winner of the Frank O’Hara Prize for Poetry) , Love Poem to Androgyny, the lake has no saint (winner of the Snowbound Prize for Poetry), Butch Geography (Tupelo Press, 2013) and most recently A Real Man Would Have a Gun (University of New Mexico Press, 2025). Waite is also the author of Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing, published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017.

Featured Organizations:

✦ is an award-winning, women-led independent publisher located in Austin, Texas. Devoted to our mission to elevate historically marginalized writers, Host Publications publishes radical poetry and fiction by emerging LGBTQ+, BIPOC, intersectional feminist, and immigrant voices.

✦ is a comfortable, accessible place for poetry—a library and meeting place which invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry.

Accessibility Notes:

✦ Masks will be required and provided to guests

✦ Poets House is fully accessible for wheelchairs, with an elevator and appropriately sized bathrooms.

Directions & Parking:

✦ Poets House has excellent subway, bus, and ferry directions on their website.

✦ Poets House has partnered with to allow visitors to purchase guaranteed parking nearby. at several locations within walking distance of Poets House.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Poets House, 10 River Terrace, New York, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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