New Works: Blacqueer Debuts with Jubi Arriola-Headley, Taylor Johnson, and Romeo Oriogun

Hear three extraordinary Blacqueer poets read from and discuss new work.  Jubi Arriola-Headley is author of original kink (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020), about which Douglas Kearney has said, “There’s warmth, sure. Love, yes lord. And even joy. But Jubi Arriola-Headley’s debut doesn’t go easy on religion, desire, power and the intersections where these collide with race, queerness, and gender.” Taylor Johnson‘s Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020) has been described by Fred Moten as containing poems that “beautifully and miraculously extend […] the general song of being sung through, of being lengthened beyond what I can know.” Romeo Oriogun‘s Sacrament of Bodies (Nebraska Press, 2020) contains poems that are said by Ellen Bass to be “spacious enough to hold all the contradictions: the violence waged against gay people and the body’s insistence on love, the tenderness of flesh and the carnage of war, remembering and forgetting, silence and song.”

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Jubi Arriola-Headley (he/him) is a Black queer poet, storyteller, & first-generation United Statesian who lives with his husband in South Florida & whose work explores themes of manhood, vulnerability, rage, tenderness & joy. He’s a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, holds an MFA from the University of Miami,  & his poems have been published with Ambit, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod,  Southeastern Humanities Review, The Nervous Breakdown, & elsewhere. Jubi’s debut collection of poems, original kink, is available now from Sibling Rivalry Press.

Taylor Johnson is proud of being from Washington, DC. They’ve received fellowships and scholarships from CALLALOO, Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, Tin House, the Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, the Conversation Literary Festival,  the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, among other organizations. In 2017, Taylor received the Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Their poems appear in The Baffler, Indiana Review, Scalawag, and the Paris Review, among other journals and literary magazines. Their first book, Inheritance, will be published November 2020 with Alice James Books. Taylor lives in southern Louisiana where they listen.

Romeo Oriogun is the author of The Origin of Butterflies, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His debut poetry collection, Sacrament of Bodies, was published by African Poetry Book Fund in spring 2020.