My organization, Reading Queer, unveils its line up for the first annual Reading Queer Festival, which runs August 22nd – August 30th. The Festival was funded by the Knight Arts Challenge Miami and features poetry readings, performances, a salon and writing workshop by locally and nationally recognized queer writers and performers from Digital Hostage Collective, Damian Rojo, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Octavio Campos, Julie Marie Wade, Sandra Simonds, Jan Becker and L. Lamar Wilson.

Reading Queer.

The inaugural event, sponsored by the Betsy Hotel and Friends Fun Wine, features three amazing female writers who represent the spectrum of work being created in Florida. Julie Marie Wade, Sandra Simonds and Jan Becker will share work that emerges from unique perspectives of being and/or writing queerly. This event takes place Friday, August 22nd, from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. with a cocktail reception, reading, and post-reading mix and mingle at The B-Bar at The Betsy Hotel South Beach, 1440 Ocean Dr., Miami Beach,. RSVP here. Sandra Simonds will also  lead a poetry workshop, “The Personal is  Political,” a collaboration with O, Miami and Reading Queer. To RSVP for the writing workshop, visit here.

On Wednesday, August 27th from 7 – 9 p.m. at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, Digital Hostage Collective will transform the garden into a space of queer utopian longing for “Cruising Hialeah” and “Ghosts of Public Sex,” a performance and video installation in memory of queer academic José Esteban Muñoz. “Cruisers” like dance theater provocateur Octavio Campos and choreographer Pioneer Winter will interact with visitors, soliciting them to listen to oral histories about growing up queer in Miami and Hialeah during the 1980s — the time of José Esteban Muñoz‘s coming-of-age as a gay man — while soprano Celeste Fraser Delgado and tenor José Vilanova circulate the grounds, evoking the devastating impact of the AIDS pandemic with haunting arias. Viewers will be led to a provocative installation created by Damian Rojo. (Please note that this event is not appropriate for minors.) RSVP here.

The Festival will culminate in a performance with poet L. Lamar Wilson, whose book, Sacrilegion, has been set to a choir directed by Carl DuPont and performed with Lloyd Reshard, Jr. and Leo Williams. The hybrid poetry reading/concert evokes a time in Wilson’s life that radically shaped his present. It reveals intimate details about a man struggling to come to terms with his faith, his identity and his family. The culminating event will take place at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden on Saturday, August 30th from 7 -9 p.m. RSVP here.

Preview the entire Schedule of Events, which also includes a salon and a creative writing workshop, at www.readingqueer.org.