Your hold is ready! (11. 29. 24)

(A photo-heavy newsletter, get ready!)

Hello all –– can you believe it’s almost December?!

I hope those of you in the u.s. are having a restful long weekend. Today, as well as yesterday, are national days of mourning for Indigenous peoples across what is now known as the “u.s.” Having grown up near the traditional lands of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe –– one of three surviving groups of the original sixty-nine Wampanoag tribes, which underwent and continue to undergo genocide at the hands of the “pilgrims” and their descendants –– I feel compelled to share this link to donate. Donations support myriad programs, including cultural education, housing, mental healthcare, and more. When our “holidays” are inextricably tied to violent, ongoing dispossession, it is our responsibility to look.

Overall, November was a month full of travel for me: I visited three bookstore locations and one conference, spending time in states I’d never really visited before. This, plus a series of rapidly encroaching deadlines, have made for an incredibly busy, rewarding month.

First was Denver, CO, where my reading with Bri Gonzalez was shifted online due to snow (!), which was exciting to see for the first time this season. Next, I flew to Chicago, where I had a delightful reading at Pilsen Community Books, the radical indie store local to featherproof, Failure to Comply’s publisher.

Particularly given the election –– which, unbelievably, happened only a few weeks ago –– it was a relief to be in openly, ardently radical spaces, where we could speak openly about strategies for resisting fascism and keeping each other safe.

Then, I took an Amtrak charter bus –– which I had never taken for this length of time (about 3.5 hours) before and was surprised to find clean, quiet, and relatively pleasant overall! –– to Madison, WI, to see, stay, and be in conversation with my beloved comrade Helen Rottier. Helen and I have co-organized a workshop on Mad pedagogies, which we have recently transformed into a multimodal article for the International Mad Studies Journal (forthcoming!).

We had a wonderful reading and conversation at A Room of One’s Own, to a packed/standing-room-only audience, including

Kai Minosh Pyle

! It’s the best event I’ve ever done, in a series of incredible events. Failure to Comply is 10% off through the end of November –– what better way to spend Black Friday/Small Business Saturday?!

Lastly, I went to the National Women’s Studies Association conference, this year in Detroit, MI. I got to spend time with friend and fellow writer

andrea lianne

before popping into the NWSA festivities. I had the honor of sitting on an author meets critics panel with Margaret Price, a giant in the field of Critical Mad Studies and author of the recent book Crip Spacetime (which is, as all scholarship should be, open access). Sitting alongside idols that have become colleagues was both exciting and humbling, especially as I finish my grad school journey.

Left to right: Janaka Lewis, Andrea Riley Mukavetz, Margaret Price, Cavar, Akemi Nishida, Logan Smilges.

After that, at last, I got to come back to Davis! The fun wasn’t over yet –– on 11/23, I participated in my first ever 10k run. I finished it, and not only that, but finished it without stopping or walking. My jog was slow, but slow and steady…finishes the race in a time that seems (?) respectable for a first-timer. I’m very proud of myself!

Also, add me on Strava if that’s your thing.

Oh, and in the midst of all of that, on Nov. 15, the sixth issue of manywor(l)ds came out, and I’m thrilled with it –– submissions reopen on Dec. 1! I’m almost done compiling edits for Mad Dykes, Queer Worlds for Sinister Wisdom, as well as the Disability Justice issue of smoke + mold, both of which I’m guest-editing.

These days, what I’m up to mostly revolves around teaching and (until I receive my dissertation edits/comments) ~creative~ writing work. I had a wonderful meeting with my agent, Noah Grey Rosenzweig, recently, and feel prepared to dive into the first round of edits on Novel #2, whose title I’ll drop…soon! Hopefully! I’m also wrapping up prep for a course I’m designing and will be teaching in the spring at the University of Maine: Augusta –– let me know if you’d like to see/hear more about that.

Thanks in advance to everyone who has made it through this long preamble! As always, check out Failure to Comply, add it on Goodreads and Storygraph, and request it at your local bookstores and libraries. Find inspo/similar reads/books that fed Failure to Comply at my Bookshop affiliate page, where each of your orders gives me a dollar! You can find my gift recommendations, both literary and non-literary, below:

Now, at long last, onto the recommendations!

Today’s Recs:

Books:

• Bri Gonzalez, A Wellness Check

• Karin Tidbeck, Amatka

• Larissa Lai & Rita Wong, Sybil Unrest

Podcasts + Digital Media

• A Series of Rooms

• Reclaimed

Poetry & Prose & In-Between:

• Nathaniel Brown, Post-Dinner Interview with a Twelve-Year-Old Who Sat at the Grown-Ups’ Table for the First Time on Thanksgiving (2021)

• Zach Arnett, Stupor (2024)

• Jasmin Sandelson, A Lot of Other Women (2024).

• Diane Wakoski, Blue Monday (1988)

• Dorothy Thompson, Who Goes Nazi? (1941) [if you read nothing else in this newsletter, read this.]

Essays and Articles:

• Fosco Lucarelli, Mary Ellen Solt, Moonshot Sonnet (1964) (2019)

• Marina Bolotnikova and Christine Mi, I Gave Up Meat and Gained So Much More (2024)

• Sara Nović, Signed Away (2024)

• Robin Wall Kimmerer and Jenny Odell, Gift Thinking (2024).

• Audrey Wright, Brian Wright, and Bianca Sanon, Paradis Lost: The life and death of a radical Miami bookstore (2024)

• Camille LaFevre, Naomi Cohn On the Sensory Experience of Reading with Her Hands (2024)

My Recent Work:

• Goodbye Forever Party (print) in Filling Station

• You May Feel Odd or Different All Day in The Offing

• nude / poem / with (top : scar) in where meadows

• Every Trans Suicide is State-Sanctioned Murder in Protean Magazine

• Three Micros in X-RAY Lit

• Loving Renee Back in The Rumpus

• This event may contain singing / accompanying craft essay in Half Mystic

• POEM IN WHICH I READ TRANS in JAKE Magazine, *nominated for Best of the Net*!

• My Reflection Has Been Tricky Lately in JAKE Magazine

• dyke (genealogy) / alt: a letter to my grandfather in this first year of silence in Canthius *Priscilla Uppal Memorial Prize for Poetry honorable mention*

• Mad Studies in khōréō.

• Burrito Texts: Mel Baggs and the Language of Crip Life in Review of Disability Studies (academic).

• port-man-toes: the aroace - queercrip - transmad - neuroqueer erotics of digital collaboration with ulysses/constance bougie in Kairos (academic?!?)

• Find my chapbooks on my website and my Goodreads author page! Contact me for PDF requests.

  That’s all for now! Again, feel free to let me know what you think, what you’d like to see more of, and if you have any recommendations of your own!