Trish Salah & Friends: Hamilton Book Launch

Trish Salah returns to Hamilton for the launch of the Canadian edition of Lyric Sexology, Volume 1.

Joining her are 2017 Lambda Award finalists jia qing wilson-yang (winner of best trans fiction) and Kai Cheng Thom.

Where: The Reading Room at Bryan Prince Bookseller – 1060 King Street West.

Free, but seating is limited.

The venue is an accessible space.

This event is presented in partnership with Metonymy Press; Bent Q Media; Queer Outta Hamilton and Hamilton Pride.

Lyric Sexology, Vol 1: The first-ever Canadian edition, with four additional poems and a new introduction. Written between lyric and language poetries, and exploring the transgender fantasies encoded in feminist, autobiographical, anthropological and psychoanalytic archives.

Drawing upon Freud’s interpretation of the memoirs of the jurist Daniel Paul Schreber, alongside gender theories, polemics and case studies dating from the end of the 20th century to beginning of the 21st, Trish Salah samples and remixes the clinic and the club, dystopia and draughty apartments, re-presenting an emergent transgender subject in all (or at least some) of her/hir/his/their messy contrariness and queerly multiple biomythographies. One might even call this composite a syncretic strategy for building a conceptual, poetic world in a single volume. But, inevitably, more is left out than in.

Trish Salah is an Arab Canadian writer, activist, cultural critic, and university professor. Her first volume of poetry, Wanting in Arabic, was published in 2002 by TSAR Publications and reissued in a new edition in 2013. Salah studied creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal, and subsequently completed a Ph.D. in English Literature at York University in Toronto. She currently teaches in Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Her creative and scholarly work addresses transgender and transsexual politics and experience, diasporic Arab identity and culture, anti-racism, queer politics and economic and social justice. Her poetry moves between and combines traditional and experimental forms. Trish received the Lambda Award for Transgender Fiction in 2014.

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir is the highly sensational, ultra-exciting, sort-of true coming-of-age story of a young Asian trans girl, pathological liar, and kung-fu expert who runs away from her parents’ abusive home in a rainy city called Gloom. Striking off on her own, she finds her true family in a group of larger-than-life trans femmes who live in a mysterious pleasure district known only as the Street of Miracles. Under the wings of this fierce and fabulous flock, the protagonist blossoms into the woman she has always dreamed of being, with a little help from the unscrupulous Doctor Crocodile. When one of their number is brutally murdered, she joins her sisters in forming a vigilante gang to fight back against the transphobes, violent johns, and cops that stalk the Street of Miracles. But when things go terribly wrong, she must find the truth within herself in order to stop the violence and discover what it really means to grow up and find your family.

Kai Cheng Thom is the recipient of the Writers’ Trust 2017 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers. She is a writer, performance artist, social worker, fierce trans femme and notorious liar who loves lipstick and superhero cartoons. A prolific essayist and poet, her work appears online in publications including BuzzFeed, xoJane, Everyday Feminism, and Autostraddle; and in print in Asian American Literary Review, Plenitude, and Matrix Magazine, among others. Her first collection of poetry, a place called No Homeland, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in Spring 2017. As a spoken word artist, she has appeared and featured at venues including Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the Banff Centre for the Arts. She is also a mental health community worker and co-founder of the collective Monster Academy: Mental Health Skills for Montreal Youth. Kai Cheng lives in Montreal and Toronto, both of which were built on unceded Indigenous territory. Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir is her first novel. Kai Cheng is a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Award for Transgender Fiction.

Small Beauty tells the story of Mei, who in coping with the death of her cousin abandons her life in the city to live in his now empty house in a small town. There she connects with his history as well as her own, learns about her aunt’s long-term secret relationship, and reflects on the trans women she left behind. She also brushes up against some local trans mysteries and gets advice from departed loved ones with a lot to say.

jia qing wilson-yang is a mixed race trans woman living in Toronto. She likes to write poems and stories and music. Her writing has appeared in Bound to Struggle: Where Kink and Radical Politics Meet (ed. Simon Strikeback), Letters Lived: Radical Reflections, Revolutionary Paths (ed. Sheila Sampath), and the women of colour issue of Room magazine. She has recorded several acoustic albums and this one time was a drummer in a pop punk band. Small Beauty is her first novel. jia qing is the winner of the 2017 Lambda Award for Transgender Fiction and received an Honour of Distinction from the 2016 Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers.