About this Event
Poet and performed T.S. Leonard presents his new collection, Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, a dazzling debut charting queer survival, memory, and joy across time. He will be joined in conversation by Patrick Milian, author of The Unquiet Country.
Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size.
Winner of the 2024-2025 Poetic Justice Institute Prize
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 is a poet, performer, and author of works published in Poetry, Foglifter, 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. Leonard’s audio and visual work includes the mixtape Even Still They Shook (2020), contributions to Spectral Transmissions (Portland Art Museum, 2020) and Wrapture (Pacific Design Center, 2024) and performances in the band Soft Butch. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.
Patrick Milian is the author of The Unquiet Country (Entre Ríos Books) and the chapbook Pornographies (Graying Ghost). He is the recipient of fellowships at the University of Washington's Simpson Center for the Humanities and Utah State University's Center for Intersectional Gender Studies. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and creative nonfiction, his work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, and the Lambda Literary Award-shortlisted anthology Between Certain Death and a Possible Future. His musical collaborations with composer Emerson Eads are published by Northstar Music. Patrick's debut novel, Night Town, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in June 2027.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
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