KEYNOTES AND FEATURED PERFORMERSClimbing PoeTree is the combined force of Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman. Over the last 11 years, Climbing PoeTree has been at the forefront of social and environmental justice movements by harnessing their art as a tool for popular education, community organizing, and personal transformation. Their award-winning performance is composed of dual-voice spoken word poetry, hip hop, and multimedia theatre that dissolves apathy with hope, exposes injustice, and helps heal our inner trauma so that we may begin to cope with the issues facing our communities.
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Lydia X. Z. Brown (Autistic Hoya) is a gender/queer and transracially/transnationally adopted east asian autistic activist, writer, and speaker whose work has largely focused on violence against multiply-marginalized disabled people, especially institutionalization, incarceration, and policing. They have worked to advance transformative change through organizing in the streets, writing legislation, conducting anti-ableism workshops, testifying at regulatory and policy hearings, and disrupting institutional complacency everywhere from the academy to state agencies and the nonprofit-industrial complex. At present, Lydia is co-president of TASH New England, chairperson of the Massachusetts Developmental Disabilities Council, and an executive board member of the Autism Women's Network. In collaboration with Elesia Ashkenazy and Morénike Giwa-Onaiwu, Lydia is the lead editor and visionary behind All the Weight of Our Dreams, a forthcoming anthology of writings and artwork by autistic people of color. Previously, Lydia worked for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network’s national public policy team. Lydia has been honored by the White House, the Washington Peace Center, Pacific Standard, and Mic. Lydia’s work has been featured in various anthologies, including Criptiques, Torture in Healthcare Settings, and QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology, and periodicals including Tikkun, Disability Intersections, Black Girl Dangerous, hardboiled magazine, POOR Magazine, and the Washington Post.
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Scarlett Pedersen//Doe Fields is a spirit from Cassiopeia inhabiting a poet’s body. She found spoken word while living in Boston, and has since come to Olympia and taken the Cascadia poetry scene in a quiet storm. She writes about nature, women, and exes. She’s also a clever witch and if you’d like her to cast a spell on you or your loved ones, you can contact her at [email protected]
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MissTANGQ is a multi-media synesthetic artist and first-generation mystic-nerd. She is deeply inspired by the hyphenated experience and explores this through visual art, installation, fashion and DJing to create cross-sensory and multi-disciplinary work. She is a traveler in the margins and crossroads of both identity and the terrestrial to astral experience. She believes in the fertile power of these places to remix our perceptions of and connection to the world. She loves to sing on her bike and plot what she's going to eat next. Dancing is one of her favorite forms of space travel.
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Sister Glo Euro N’Wei is a Seattle-based queer health advocate, femme faerie, poet and nun. She believes that the most radical and revolutionary act is learning to love our queer selves. She is drawn to sparkly objects and seeks to embody the transformative power of glitter and love in action. As a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, The Abbey of St. Joan, Sister Glo has been nunning her way through Seattle’s queer nonprofit scene for way more than a decade, raising thousands of dollars for charities, and spreading love, joy and smiles.
Founded in 1996, The Abbey of St. Joan is Seattle’s official order of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Our mission reads: We are an order of 21st Century nuns dedicated to the promulgation of universal joy and the expiation of stigmatic guilt. We work to raise money for AIDS charities; fight for queer rights and visibility; do safer sex outreach; and strive diligently to maintain our sense of humor, never taking ourselves so seriously that we forget to have fun. We gladly welcome all races, creed, genders and sexual orientations. |