Come listen to this incredible lineup read their own work as well as writing by other queer greats—people like Patricia Highsmith, Kathy Acker, Fleur Jaeggy, Richard Siken, Jane Bowles, Dorothy Allison and Denton Welch! There might even be a bon bon or two.
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Liz Asch is a writer, visual artist, and creative embodiment instructor. She holds a BA from Vassar, an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and a Masters in Chinese Medicine. Liz hosts Body Land Metaphor Medicine, a collection of surrealist guided visualizations you can listen to on your podcast apps. Liz writes literary erotica, lyric essays, poetry, meditations, and explorations on visual art. An intellectual sensualist, she believes in seeking new ways to grant ourselves permission to become who we are meant to be. Her short story collection, Your Salt on My Lips: (Mostly) Queer Literary Erotica (Cleis Press, 2021) was celebrated as "reinventing the genre of erotica" and "erotica at its best."
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Sara Jaffe is a writer living in Portland, OR. Hurricane Envy, a short story collection, is forthcoming in 2026 from Rescue Press. Dryland, a novel, was published by Tin House Books and Cipher Press (UK ). Her short fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared or are upcoming in publications including Catapult, Fence, BOMB, NOON, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She co-edited The Art of Touring (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians drawing on her experience as guitarist for post-punk band Erase Errata.
Sara holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, RADAR Productions, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council. She is also co-founding editor of New Herring Press, a publisher of prose chapbooks. She teaches creative writing at Reed College and as part of the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Low-Residency Creative Writing MFA.
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Martha Shelley is a longtime political activist from Brooklyn. After the Stonewall Riot, she organized a protest march that morphed into today’s pride parades, and she was one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front. Her essays, poetry, and short stories have appeared in many anthologies. She has published three novels and four books of poetry. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
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Joni Renee Whitworth (he/they) is a poet, experimental filmmaker, and curator from Oregon.
They have performed at The Moth, the Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art alongside Marina Abramovic. Whitworth served as the inaugural Artist in Residence at Portland Parks and Recreation, Poet in Residence for Oregon State University's Trillium Project, and 2020 Queer Hero for the Gay & Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest. They are currently a New Media Fellow at Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow. They were a 2021 Fellow at Lambda Literary and a 2019 and 2020 Fellow at Tin House.
They work at the intersection art, performance, and activism, with a focus on queer and neurodivergent perspectives and themes. They've given lectures, participated in panel discussions, founded a non-profit queer art museum and artist collective, been a teaching artist for a youth program, and hosted a podcast about the future of art and culture. Additionally, they have written and performed several plays and participated in a variety of performances and art installations that deal with issues of mental health and neurodivergence, queer culture and the intersection of spirituality, technology and body consciousness.
Their writing explores themes of nature, future, family, and the neurodivergent body, and has appeared in Lambda Literary, Tin House, Oregon Humanities, Proximity Magazine, Seventeen Magazine, Eclectica, Pivot, SWWIM, Smeuse, Superstition Review, xoJane, Inverted Syntax, Unearthed Literary Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Dime Show Review, the Oregonian, and The Write Launch. They are currently working on slipstream climate fiction.
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Patrick Dundon is the author of the chapbook The Conspirators of Pleasure (Sixth Finch Books). He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Witness, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, OR where he serves as an editor for the Burnside Review and is working on a novel.
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Donal Mosher is a photographer and filmmaker, occasional writer and musician.
Co-director at Wishbone Films with Mike Palmieri.