About this Event
We are honored to host T.S. Leonard in celebration of his Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival - a dazzling debut poetry collection traversing queer history and survival--from Missouri to San Francisco, the AIDS epidemic to COVID-19, from Joni Mitchell to Destiny's Child. T.S. Leonard will be joined in conversation by Steffan Triplett, with an opening reading by T.C. Martin, and music by DJ Queen Father.
Winner of the 2024-2025 Poetic Justice Institute Prize, a dazzling debut charting queer survival, memory, and joy across time
A time traveler crashes into a gay bar, and from that electric collision unfolds Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, T. S. Leonard’s dazzling debut poetry collection. Moving through glitter, ash, memory, and music, these poems follow a queer time traveler across decades and geographies, from turn-of-the twenty-first-century Missouri to 1970s San Francisco to imagined origins of music itself. Along the way, they come of age, try drag, lose friends, and fall in love, tracing a life shaped by history’s ruptures and its celebrations.
Leonard’s poems travel through temporal sites of plague and resilience, from the AIDS epidemic to COVID-19 lockdowns, while also lingering in spaces of dance, performance, and community such as discos, living rooms, archives, and bars. Themes of change course throughout the collection in climate and cities, in bodies and identities, and in the fragile yet enduring structures of queer belonging. Even as the poems confront grief and loss, they insist on joy as an equally vital inheritance.
Rich with cultural references, from The Wizard of Oz to Felix González-Torres, from Tim Dlugos to Destiny’s Child, Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival reads like a jukebox of queer history, each poem a track spinning across time. Leonard’s voice is playful, elegiac, and searching, asking how memory becomes record and how record becomes song. The result is a collection alive with humor, tenderness, and fierce imagination, a testament to survival and to the music that carries us through.
T.S. LEONARD (he/they) is a poet, performer, and author of works published in Foglifter, Poetry, and Fourteen Poems. Leonard’s debut poetry collection, Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival (Fordham University Press, 2026), was selected for the 2024-2025 Poetic Justice Institute Prize. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.
STEFFAN TRIPLETT is a Black, queer writer born and raised in southwest Missouri. He is the author of the hybrid memoir Bad Forecast (Essay Press) and the essay chapbook Constraints (New Michigan Press). His recent work is forthcoming or appears in Obsidian, Foglifter, Poetry Daily, and It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press). He is the Managing Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh and has received fellowships and support from Cave Canem, Outpost, Lambda Literary, Callaloo, the Blue Mountain Center, and Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh.
T.C. MARTIN (he/they) is a nonfiction writer and poet from southern Maryland. His essays and poems have been published in Brevity, Poets.org, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity newsletter, and elsewhere. His work has won Phoebe Journal’s Spring Nonfiction Contest, Ninth Letter’s Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, and the Jean Meyer Aloe Poetry Prize. He lives and teaches in Pittsburgh.
About meTamorphosis:
Created by White Whale's events coordinator, Amari Onyx, meTamorphosis is a local queer & trans led event series committed to uplifting emerging LGBTQ+ writers by curating inclusive community readings in Pittsburgh, PA. meTamorphosis celebrates queer & trans people's commitment to ongoing transformation and embracing change to become who they know themselves to be.
Amari Onyx (he/him) is a Black trans poet & artist based in Pittsburgh, PA. Poetry, art, and community sustain his existence, which inspired the creation of meTamorphosis in 2024. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review and The Shade Journal and is set to appear in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Callaloo, and twurl. Amari is an editor working within, across, and between genres for 3 Sisters Literary. He is a proud trans vogue fem in The Illustrious Kiki Haus of Baby Phat.
Event venue & nearby stays
White Whale Bookstore, 4754 Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, United States
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