Reading Queer.

The Reading Queer Literary Festival opens this Friday, August 22nd from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. at the B Bar at the Betsy Hotel South Beach. Florida-based writers Julie M. Wade, Jan Becker and Sandra Simonds kick off the Inaugural reading for the first-ever queer-focused literary festival in Miami. Reading Queer (a Knight Arts grantee) was conceived by Paula Kolek, Maureen Seaton and myself. We spent the day eating guacamole and writing poems (like all nerds do) on a sunny day inside Seaton’s comfy apartment just 50 feet away from Hollywood Beach. Who needs the sea when you have poetry, right? I don’t recall the specifics of the conversation, all I know is that the we collaborated on a draft proposal, submitted it to the Knight Arts Challenge and won a matching grant to establish Reading Queer to promote, foster and support queer literary and artistic culture in Miami. Reading Queer community workshop at the Bakehouse on February 1, 2014.

The inaugural Reading Queer Festival (August 22nd – August 30th) embraces hybrid, genre-bending work that reflects the diversity and complexity of queer identity, while also going beyond the confines of the sexuality of the writer and/or characters. “What if queer literature could be more broadly, more radically, defined?” asks Reading Queer Program Director José Portela. “What if the queerness of the poem, the novel or the short story was given less by whom an author does and more by what a text is doing—or undoing, for that matter?”

Join Reading Queer this Friday at the Betsy Hotel as Wade, Simonds and Becker begin to answer these questions–authors whose “work speaks to the succulent complexity of Reading, Writing, Being and Becoming Queer.”

The Reading Queer Festival Inaugural Reading with Julie Marie Wade, Sandra Simonds and Jan Becker will take place on Friday, August 22nd from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. It will consist of a wine reception, reading and opportunity to mix and mingle with writers. At the B Bar at The Betsy Hotel South Beach, 1440 Ocean Dr., Miami Beach; 305-531-6100; RSVP here.