Saints and Sinners Festival Queer AF Offsite

Welcome to the Saints and Sinners Festival Queer AF Offsite! Join us at The Domino for an evening of celebration and empowerment, featuring local and out-of-town writers. This is a night you won't want to miss!

Kay Murphy is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Orleans where she taught in the English Department, the Creative Writing Workshop, and the Honors Program, and served as Poetry Editor for Bayou. She continues to work with graduate students and to teach in the Low Residency MFA Program. She was awarded the Louisiana Division of the Arts Individual Artist Grant in 2002 for her poetry and a University-wide Excellence in Teaching Award in 2001. Since coming to UNO in the fall of 1984, she has published over fifty essays/reviews of contemporary poetry in national journals such as The American Book Review, Chelsea, and The Spoon River Poetry Review. Besides reviews, she has published fiction in such journals as Ascent and Fiction International. Her heart genre, poetry, has appeared in over 100 journals such as North American Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry, and College English. She is the author of two poetry collections: The Autopsy and Belief Blues.

Miah Jeffra is author of four books—most recently The Violence Almanac (finalist for several awards, including the Grace Paley and Robert C Jones Book Prizes) and the novel American Gospel, finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award—and is co-editor of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart. Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press, and teaches writing, decolonial studies and cultural theory at Santa Clara University. Their favorite color is fried chicken.

Penda Smith is a creative writer, educator, and thinker living and breathing in New Orleans. Her work focuses on mother-and-daughter relationships, coming-of-age narratives, African diaspora studies, and slavery. Inspired by her Senegalese heritage, she raises questions about belonging, identity, consent, and pleasure within the afterlife of slavery. She has received support from the Cave Canem Foundation, Hedgebrook Writing Residency, Hurston/Wright Writers workshop, and you can find her work at Muzzle Magazine, Root Work Journal, and Obsidian Journal. Aside from writing, she loves hot yoga, roller skating, and twerking her trauma out. She teaches at Loyola University and loves her cat Prudence.

Malik Thompson (he/they) is a Black queer person from Washington, DC. His work has been published in the Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and residencies from organizations including Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, the Anderson Center, and Monson Arts. He can be found on IG via the handle @latesummerstar.

Todd Osborne is a poet and teacher originally from Nashville. His debut poetry collection, Gatherer, came out last year from Belle Point Press. He is a feedback editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and his poems have been featured at Scrawl Place, CutBank, The Missouri Review, Tar River Poetry, and EcoTheo Review. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with his wife, their son, and their three cats.

Danny Unger is a queer, Jewish writer and social worker. She grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia and has spent her adulthood in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is currently in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans, studying poetry. Dear Egg, is her first chapbook. 

Jacob Budenz is a Baltimore-based author, multidisciplinary performer, and witch with an MFA from University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins whose work focuses on the intersection of queer otherness and the otherworldly. The author of Tea Leaves (Bywater Books 2023), Jake has work in journals including Slipstream, Taco Bell Quarterly, Wussy Mag, and more as well as anthologies by Mason Jar Press and Unbound Edition. Outside of writing, they are the front person of Baltimore psychedelic pop darlings Moth Broth, have mounted numerous grant-winning and acclaimed experimental theater projects, and recently presented "Apology for the Divine Masculine," a multi-media performance about role of patriarchal violence in climate catastrophe, at The Walters Art Museum. Follow them on instagram @dreambabyjake or visit www.jakebeearts.com for more.

Ashley Young is a Black, Queer, non-binary, femme poet, writer, teacher, healer and community organizer. They are a 2010 Voices of Our Nation's Foundation Poetry Fellow and a 2011/2016 Lambda Literary Nonfiction Fellow. Their 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 Lambda Literary Award winning Glitter and Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy (Portland Studio). They have also been featured in several online magazines, such as Elixher, Autostraddle, Rest as Resistance, Rvkvry Journal and more.

Dan Meltz was raised in the low-rent reaches of Jersey, 16 minutes from Times Square, and has lived in Manhattan for fifty years. He’s a retired technical writer and teacher of Deaf young people, with a B.A. from Columbia (no honors). Both his first book of poems, “It Wasn’t Easy to Reach You,” from Trail to Table, and his first novel, “Rabbis of the Garden State," from Rattling Good Yarns, have been published in 2025.

Meghan Sullivan is a poet, teacher, Long Islander, and lover. Currently living and working in New Orleans, she is the runner up for the 2022 Andrea-Saunders Gereighty Award and an Associate Editor for Bayou Magazine. She is pursuing her MFA in Poetry in the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. Her poems and interviews have been published in several print and online publications, including Tilted House, Peauxdunque Review, and Ellipsis.

Fernando is a New Orleans native and graduate of UNO's Creative Writing Workshop. The Words and Music Festival hosted a reading of his Southern tragic-comic one-act, What Do You Mean, Abilene? at the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice in fall 2023. The same festival produced a reading of his coming-of-age one-act 7th Ward Tony, adapted from co-writer Mona Lisa Saloy’s poem from Black Creole Chronicles. He’s performed short plays like “High Drama at the Boy Bar Before Christmas,” at the Domino for lmnl events. He adapted Elizabeth Miki Brina’s “New Tricks” essay for the stage which received readings at UNO and American Townhouse. His MFA thesis, a full-length stage adaptation of Andrew Holleran's 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance, received a café workshop with the author during the 2024 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. Fernando teaches first-year writing composition at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Follow on Instagram @alittlebitfernando

Kirsten Reneau received her MFA from the University of New Orleans, coming by way of West Virginia. She has been anthologized, nominated for prizes such as the Pushcart and Best of the Net, and was the 2022 winner of the Reed Magazine Challenge in Nonfiction. Her debut collection, Sensitive Creatures, was published in 2024 with Belle Point Press.

nat gove is a poet, writer, clarinet student who received a MFA from Queens University Charlotte in three genres. Their work has been published in Postscript Magazine, Bayou Review, Third Iris Zine, Noyo Review, Metrosphere Magazine and a couple of anthologies. She spends her nights at a jazz hall and days at home with her boutonniere and little red bean pup.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Domino, 3044 Saint Claude Avenue, New Orleans, United States