“Let’s Go On”: Kay Ulanday Barrett on Disability Justice Activism and the Filipinx

In The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies (2017), Filipinx-American performance artist, poet, and activist Kay Ulanday Barrett has been named along with, among others, Ryka Aoki, Mashuq Mushtaq, Wu Tsang, Janani Balasubramanian, Alok Vaid-Menon, Leeroy Kun Young Kang, and Zavé Martohardjono as a generation of trans Asian American political and cultural activists visibly mobilizing since the 2000s “to build social movements and living cultures that connect and energize struggles against U.S. transnational racism and white supremacy, economic exploitation, imperialism, ableism, and the cis-heterosexist binary gender/sex/sexual system.” Kay’s body of work as a poet is a testament to the intersectionalities of racial and disability justice and trans identities—in his poetry collections When the Chant Comes (Topside Press, 2016) and More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) which was a finalist at the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry.

In this conversation, I spoke with Kay on Disability Justice, trans writings across identities, and the Filipinx.

—Alton Melvar M Dapanas, September 2024

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Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I love what you’ve written in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves (ed. Laura Erickson-Schroth, Oxford University Press, 2014):

“I have always been at the cusp of different cultures. I went to a liberal university but felt surrounded by white, affluent people. This translated into the queer and transgender community. We carved queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) space, but having spaces for trans people of color was seen as too militant or as snobby, and it was dubbed as separatism or as a ‘gang approach.’”

Could you speak further about your life experience—struggles and dreams—as a trans Filipinx living with disability living in the United States?

Kay Ulanday Barrett (KUB): I grew up seeing trans people eventually in Chicago. However, at first I was raised in a very rural and white area, some would consider “country,” in conservative Michigan. I was surrounded by trees and nature, open lakes, and simultaneously around working-class white Midwestern culture. My dad was white, but ‘farmer boy and trailer park’ white. My mom was the eldest of nine from San Fabian, Pangasinan in the Philippines. The lore I was taught was that she was a rebel and a great ateh, but ran away to carve out her life, eventually being one of the first from her family to migrate to the U.S. We moved to Chicago—more Filipino, more Pinoy, just more culturally nourishing for the both of us. In Chicago, whether in Albany Park or Logan Square where I grew up, there were Trans people embedded in the community—playing mahjong, hanging out with my cousins, doing the makeup for local beauty pageants. My life was not ever void of transness and even my favorite tita, Tita Alby (not blood-related), a retired pageant queer turned makeup and hair stylist, was at my major events like birthday parties, recitals, etc. 

The plot twist is that as I came out as a dyke, then queer, and then, as transgender, my mom had a big struggle with associating gender and sexuality directly with her own worth as a mother. She faced a lot of backlash from Filipino organizations she was in as a leader at Chicago’s Rizal Center. She built community in executive board positions in Dagupan and United Pangasinan organizations, where she dedicated much of her free time. My college years ushered in a bravado in me that made me almost too flashy as a Queer and Trans person. Like my nanay, I was very brash and proud of my cultures, and for Queer and Filipino cultures to be symbiotic, for her it felt like disruption of The American Dream. From 2003 to 2010, I was a coordinator for Filipina organizations such as Gabriela Network and founded one of the first LGBTQ Filipin@ Caucuses before it became affiliated with BAYAN USA. 

In Chicago, I was raised by queer cis women and cis women of color who openly honored my Transness, worked in allyship, and challenged the larger structures of national democratic movements in the U.S. In university, my professors were Dr. Ann Russo, Dr. Francesca Royster, and Dr. Laila Farah who fueled my poetics and performances as political praxis. My mentors included organizers and educators like Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, Riza Belen, and Lani Montreal, who melded Pinay politics and organizing with cultural elements in theater and writing poetry. Nothing was compartmentalized and that truly helped me season my political and cultural practices today. 

It was confusing and it took me time to mature into an expansive understanding of transgender and nonbinary experiences, not white-loving, skinny-abled conventions of being and belonging. I had to unlearn and relearn Black Transgender and Latine Trans legacies to help name my own.

Much of the time, I was one of the only trans people coordinating and leading Pinay Summer School. In undergrad, most of the trans people at my private university where I was a scholarship kid, flanked by white trans boys with financially supportive American parents. It was confusing and it took me time to mature into an expansive understanding of transgender and nonbinary experiences, not white-loving, skinny-abled conventions of being and belonging. I had to unlearn and relearn Black Transgender and Latine Trans legacies to help name my own. It has taken me awhile to feel home in various enclaves and their renditions, even in 2010’s New York City of mostly cis gay Pinoy men who weren’t warm to a social justice approach to gender, sexuality, and so on. 

I was disabled in my twenties and felt big abandonment by the social justice spheres of radical and leftist ideologies. I was not able to make it to the parties, protests, and meetings as all were inaccessible for me. It was a momentous fulcrum where ableism, environmental racism, and queer antagonism fused all at once. None of this is new at all. But it was magnified for me. I was not abled enough to fit in the scope of transgender and masculine, which harped on labor, productivity, and a very specific prowess in terms of body and mobility. They still resonate today in party and social stratospheres, especially come June and Pride Month. Even today, on just a review of disabled representation and trans celebrities, the skinniest, closest to muscular and fit, and light-skinned usually are on the pedestal. 

I was disabled in my twenties and felt big abandonment by the social justice spheres of radical and leftist ideologies. I was not able to make it to the parties, protests, and meetings as all were inaccessible for me. It was a momentous fulcrum where ableism, environmental racism, and queer antagonism fused all at once.

At this time, I have isolated and lived in a COVID-safe pod with my partner and a rotation of 3 to 4 friends, all who test and use air purifiers everywhere we go. All the while, the police state continues to murder Black people by force and by guns. The U.S. military writes open-ended checks to fund Israel’s military in its continued genocide of Palestinians. To be honest, it is a lonely, saddening time. Many of my loved ones are in constant mourning or experiencing long COVID complications, facing an incessant reality of ableism. I do not perform in enclosed venues without mask mandates, and in 4 years, I have lost about 75 to 80% of my work as a result. Universities and events are in COVID-denial and now continue in-person and “business as usual,” despite the millions who have died and who can be affected. I realize that my current political and arts practices are in jeopardy with COVID-deniers and state-sanctioned ableism abandoning people like me. Again, nothing new, but still sharply and immensely felt. Residencies like Monson Arts refuse to consider COVID-testing and COVID-safe protocols for their artists. Literary journals that purport diversity aren’t diverse enough for disabled writers, unable to do virtual events and readings. Instead, collective care and responsibility are abandoned, disabled and sick artists are isolated and unable to attend due to individual “health concerns.” I’ve noticed literary hubs refuse to have virtual options for readers for accessibility and COVID-safety simply because it seems like a timesuck or burden. This leaves Disabled and sick immuno-compromised people behind. This is a grotesque and widespread occurrence in many organizing, social, and arts spaces. Everywhere I turn on social media, people are partying without masks on. Ableism leaves so much of the onus on disabled and sick people to figure out access to artistic spaces, or else they inevitably dispose of us. What a missed opportunity to streamline accessibility for immune-compromised and disabled artists and all kinds of artists over all! So infuriating! 

I am truly fortunate that my readers, accomplices, and chosen family are in solidarity with me, reminding me that there are ways we can create and build without ableism and white supremacy smeared on everything.  I pray to my ancestors at the altar, I cook and eat food, I take care of my sick spoonie dog, I water my plants, I protest where I can, I love where I must. 

I pray to my ancestors at the altar, I cook and eat food, I take care of my sick spoonie dog, I water my plants, I protest where I can, I love where I must. 

AMMD: How did all these activisms—against ableism, hegemonic masculinity, imperio-capitalism, class inequality, queerphobia/transphobia, among others—meet and percolate into your body of work as an activist, performance artist, and poet especially in your poetry collections When the Chant Comes (Topside Press, 2016) and More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020)?

KUB: I started writing at a confluence of peak spoken word, slam poetry, and the literary in Chicago, which was from 2004 to 2012. My poems were built initially for stage play and discovery. I toured in Mango Tribe in my early twenties, going from People of Color theaters to slam bar venues to university multicultural keynote events. We performed at May Day protests. This training taught me poems were durable, and in turn, had durable effects. They were meant to be public and spicy and witnessed. Poems were a justice making strategy. I could bring people in with food at events and they would stay for the poetry. Hahaha! The hub of my work had to be socio-economic reclamations, brutal and joy-naming, as so much of my writing process was enveloped in community initiatives: migrant organizing, Filipino/a/x organizing, and working-class embodiment. 

Anti-imperialism and a downright skepticism of Americanization stemmed from my mom and the class consciousness of Chicago neighborhoods. Our family was deeply collective in chores, duties, growing food, and ultimately re-circulating with neighbors and friends. Ikalat muna, diba? Dapat lang¹, pass it around—that was my lifeblood. The vestiges of No Child Left Behind and the implementation of Military JROTC high schools, which targeted Black, Latine, Asian, and migrant students to a pipeline, framed me and my work. Hyper-policing at Chicago highschools I attended and later taught at were definite artistic and political fodder.  

In When the Chant Comes, I was an outlying outlier. The work there pleads, addresses, and pushes back on the conventional narratives of masculinity, queerness, transness, and the american dream. I was attending Trans Day of Action and fighting for housing for trans people with Queers for Economic Justice or Audre Lorde Project simultaneously, always impacted by systemic obstacles. I was scrappy but parched, and because of that, I had daring, that discomfort when you have lost everything, your blood family all dead, and when you’re constantly being deadnamed, cannot imagine a gender-affirmation surgery or transition, can hardly get three meals a day, let alone a safe roof over your head. This palpably amplifies writing with an urgency, a call, one that doesn’t have time to consider niceness or prioritize respectability. Poetry can be demanding, and not just as an exercise in craft. It can make demands spiritually and politically. In many ways, I miss that writing, the configuration of raw emotion without upper-echelon considerations. 

I was scrappy but parched, and because of that, I had daring, that discomfort when you have lost everything, your blood family all dead, and when you’re constantly being deadnamed, cannot imagine a gender-affirmation surgery or transition, can hardly get three meals a day, let alone a safe roof over your head.

In terms of More Than Organs, if we consider how disabled poetics and crip ecologies have been amplified by literary magazine special issues by featured editors, I realize this second project was one that launched off the back of my first book. It’s considered more-literary/less-scrappy—and still trying to feed two birds with one bowl, so to speak. In this book, I reckoned with my politics inadvertently entering more white and, in many cases, academic spaces. Ableism still seeped everywhere. There’s a cross-pollination of thoughts where in both books, I am activating imagery and forms like pantoum, tanka, or epistolary approaches. This book was supported by literary organizations in fellowships, while the previous was written from disability offices and sleeping on benches. A striking grief is evident: More Than Organs released in March of 2020, unequivocally a book at the beginning of the COVID pandemic that we still face today. It anticipated speculative juxtapositions of access like climate catastrophe and accentuated many pre-existing echoes from Disabled performance arts ensemble Sins Invalid. It harnessed understanding eco-racism and ableism while aching in a lexicon that gave props to my young self, my struggling trans boi self, and the ancestors that have long loved me through it, both blood and chosen. 

Another goal of mine is to uphold a spiritual access, to cradle in the poems, though not at all a Catholic one. I wanted to honor my dead here in this book, from my ma to my queer ancestors who didn’t survive the AIDS crisis, to trans disabled people, to activist and former poet friend Brandon Lacey Campos. I aspire for my reader to understand that I come from somewhere, someone, a group, communities of people alive and dead, movements made and forged before I could even figure out the poem. Maybe that’s a reminder and plea to myself too. I survive solely by them, in their benevolence and in their ruckus. I want my book to be read by my people. I am not forging space for whiteness or abled people, and do not aim to cater to, say, respectability, which is likely why my work is frequently not welcomed. If that occurs—how lovely! I would rather my indirect audience feel discomfort and curiosity than a faux sense of representation. 

My grief is that both books, due to the vicious onslaught of systemic ableism and the pandemic, are parallel opposites in terms of their release. When When the Chant Comes was published, I publicly toured in-person. I traveled in a mask, my cane, and pain meds, wheelchair to hotel bed and those poems were read on stages from Lincoln Center to Feminist punk bookstores and protests. I had dialogues and Q&As after each performance. I shared the stage with local BIPOC and disabled and trans artists. More Than Organs has entirely been online and in virtual space, with me maybe reading from the book about once in four years at Dodge Poetry Festival. I’ve been on screens, a small laptop Zoom box, which allows a different visceral and performative experience. I perform poems not using a whole stage, necessarily, but with a bigger emphasis on vocal and breath performance. Poems pulse in a small black box theatre from my chest and up, but I cannot tour in public due to being immune-compromised. I have to stay safe when institutions (even in literary arts and social justice spaces) have zero COVID and masking protocols. I didn’t anticipate this heartbreak, but here we are. 

Poems pulse in a small black box theatre from my chest and up, but I cannot tour in public due to being immune-compromised.

AMMD: Let’s talk about ‘Filipinx,’ a term that originated from Filipino-American spaces which has been, I must say, contested even within queer and trans communities in the Philippines and in the global Filipino diaspora. The criticisms against Filipinx range from white-washing and Westernising to misappropriating Latinx.The X has indigenous, precolonial roots among what is now colonially known as Latin America, but the X isn’t found in any native Philippine syllabary. But along with Karen Buenavista Hanna and Anang Palomar, you wrote about queer vernacular and the politics of naming in the context of this coinage for Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies. Why is the Filipinx and its act of naming urgent and necessary? And how can it be executed into a form of analysis, of aesthetics, and of resistance?

KUB: Trans people are in danger. Cross-culturally and across the globe, Trans people are targeted and denied basic human rights, housing, employment, education, and food access. I think I am most interested in how trans, nonbinary, and those outside of normative heterosexual gender experiences live and try to carve out space for themselves.  I do not care what people who aren’t trans are saying because language evolves and we have the capacity to reinvent and revise. I am not going to center cis people when trans time is under scarcity and threat. No one has imposed “the X,” but more than that, people have claimed it because there is a need. Truthfully, I have been seeing a change in that as well. We are trying to carve out language in a harsh and imperfect world. Why is there such a heinous backlash against an expansive group of people ranging in class and community, many actually who are not academic? (I barely graduated from undergrad and have no MFA or PhD, as many of my organizer peers here in the States can relate to).

I am not going to center cis people when trans time is under scarcity and threat.

The same comrades and critical thinkers who refuse my pronouns are those who minimize and scrutinize the use of “X.” I do not think this is coincidental. People in the U.S. will have different experiences in their Philippine ancestry and Filipinx/a/o identity than others in the homeland and diaspora. No one is trying to impose this framework on anyone else but ourselves. It’s okay if you don’t like it, then it is not for you. I have had whole heterosexual cis men migrant and American of Philippine ancestry question not only my thoughts or vernacular but me as a person. Firstly, in Tagalog, whole phrases and numeric systems are in Spanish. Does that make someone who uses those demarcations less-than? Of course not! No, we had to live with the reality of Spanish colonization. The issue is that LGBTQ+ people of any kind have a stake in language at all. When my chill response is: Pare, everything got bakla in it. Hahahah!

In the Deaf community, there is BSL, or Black Sign Language. In the Philippines many gay and trans communities have swardspeak that utilizes Tagalog, English, Spanish, Cebuano, Japanese, and Sanskrit. Both are an example of utilizing the need for specificity while surviving hegemonic—often white—stifling and violent contexts. There are regional languages in any major city hub that vary according to neighborhood, class standing, and location. I am not trying to tell people in Milwaukee, WI not to say “bubbler” for drinking fountains. That’s their context!  This is not a new thing to realize and re-name. This choice is not taken lightly as trans people in the U.S. context are erased by the media, under-reported when murdered, and are deeply affected systematically. 

I do not know if people, especially heterosexual and cis people, understand the urgency and doom impacting queer people . In the U.S., LGBTQ+ young people are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers. In 2023, 41% of LGBTQ+ people consider suicide with more than 60% of those people being transgender and non-binary. 

Let’s go on: Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault, according to a new study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. Now couple that with being a migrant, coming from a migrant family, being poor or working-class, having a skin shade that is not beige, etc. These are all, of course, amplified in the context of the current U.S. literature scene, where LGBTQ+ books, and invariably Black and Indigenous books and books by people of color at all reader age levels, are being banned at a disgusting level. Pagod na ako ha. Until you are able to fight by my side and stop the systematic annihilation that my people face, frankly, I am not invested in whatever opinion you may have about how we name ourselves. I do not need permission. The luxury of academic discourse and articles do not interest me. Trying to artistically and politically keep ourselves alive, that is my focus. The absolute joke of it is, when you deny queer-naming and erase the voices and lineage of queer and trans people, you deny your own histories. The joke also is that many of these same criticisms will viciously come for queer and trans self-naming but never come for the white supremacy that they internalize in their events, romantic relationships, and homes. Such selective anger, yes?

Until you are able to fight by my side and stop the systematic annihilation that my people face, frankly, I am not invested in whatever opinion you may have about how we name ourselves. I do not need permission.

Trans people have always been, no matter what we call ourselves or what vernacular we engage. My friend and colleague Anang Palomar has mentioned how the descendants of our colonizers refer to themselves as Tita Baby, Tita Girlie, Hija, Hijo, and that’s cool. These terms are rooted in American military occupation and colonial Spain, yet they are sustained and considered endearing. Anang has aptly noted, “Why the double standard?” Communities who face one form of oppression continue to utilize their privilege to mock, demean, dismiss, and police queer and trans communities, insisting that outsiders can police and dictate what we call ourselves. As a disabled person, I use spoonie as an insider’s term for people who use spoons as a unit of disabled measurement. I do not expect non-disabled people to like these terms, or to get it. If I had to prove my humanity, culture, and language to people who refuse my innovations, I would be long dead. 

According to Audre Lorde, naming one’s full identity is a key part of radical social change. The idea that any Queer or Trans person can have a say on how to identify their expansive range of gender and sexuality without any consideration of cis and straight people is not only glorious but necessary. Cis and straight people also use the X, by the way. We’re all doing our best to be sustainably witnessed in the annihilation of the U.S. empire, an empire fueled on straight and purist notions of binary gender roles. I am not invested in the comfort of derecho or cis fragility. 

AMMD: Filipinos mostly conflate sexual orientation with gender identity and expression, and come from a country that’s still reeling over the after-effects (skewed Catholic conservatism) of 333 years of Spanish colonisation and to this day, without a comprehensive sex education programme. Within our cishet majoritarian communities, the tomboy or linalaki (which are gender expressions) is inaccurately equated with lesbianism (a sexual orientation). Lesbian femmes and other women-loving-women (outside masculine identities) are non-existent in their imaginary. In one of your essays, you identified as a “kuya, butch, AG, stud, or brown boi.” Could you speak further on how language can be used in renaming and, consequently, reclaiming power?

KUB: Colonization is the treachery that keeps on giving. I think I have to consider a shift in naming myself, as “stud” is more of a Black American term that doesn’t encapsulate my experience. Butch, kuya, and brown boi still apply, I believe. Now in my age, I guess I am in my tito era na. 

Knowing you exist is one thing—it is personal, a solo confessional. But when vernacular is introduced it ultimately introduces the complexity of having a community together. There is a need to label and name so you can be identified by kin. People in jobs, whether carpenter, engineer, or dancer, all have names and titles to denote what their gifts are, who they belong to, what they care about or specialize in. The geopolitics that one faces is faced collectively, and (as Disability Justice centers) interdependently. Naming can complicate and offer various angles of kindred for underrepresented and under-supported communities that are overshadowed and edited out. I find naming myself is an effort to embrace space and time continuums. By doing so, I am honoring ancestors and my lineages. In doing this, I call out the very present to find people to kindle with. By naming, I get to hope that my own futurity can harmonize with the future of my communities. 

I am in my forties now, and I can guarantee that younger queer and trans disabled people will transform terminology. I am so happy to have contributed to that for the time I am able. Maybe, in the future, there’ll be some things I won’t understand. My hope is that I will be as open-hearted and excited by these new definitions as communities continue to find liberation in language and beyond dusty notions of conventional acceptance.

I find naming myself is an effort to embrace space and time continuums. By doing so, I am honoring ancestors and my lineages. In doing this, I call out the very present to find people to kindle with. By naming, I get to hope that my own futurity can harmonize with the future of my communities.

AMMD: When we speak of Trans Literature in the United States, you are in the canon. In Trish Salah’s chapter on transgender and transgenre writings for The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Fiction (2021), she lists you along with Casey Plett, Tom Cho, Alec Butler, Sybil Lamb, Jeanne Thornton, Torrey Peters, Vivek Shraya, Ryka Aoki, Ceyenne Doroshow, Samuel Ace, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Joshua Jennifer Espinosa, Jos Charles, Nat Raha, Ching-In Chen, Andrea Abi-Karam, Cat Fitzpatrick, and more. In Asian American Literature in Transition (2021), you’re lined up with Ryka Aoki, Kai Cheng Thom, Jia Qing Wilson-Yang, and Kit Yan. I would like to know your overall take on literary canon and canon-making? As a poet and an activist at the same time, how does being part of it make you feel?

KUB: Oh goodness! What an honor to be named in each of these prolific spaces by writers and texts who I have learned so much from and respect. One streamlined thread for both of my books, no matter how I age, grow, and shift, is that the literary milieu was and is always peripheral. I appreciate being named in the Asian Literature and Trans Literature canon (both!), but it did not come to me freely or easily. Had you asked Kay twenty years ago, I would have been super surprised I even published a book. Rarely do I actually find mainstream Asian writers (possibly due to not being exclusively academic-forward or invested in white love or wealth) call on my work. That’s okay! Once, I had all people of color and migrant restaurant workers book me due to the experiences I wrote about being a service worker and domestic worker’s child. 

Currently, we see that Palestine and the fight for Palestinian liberation has been a magnifying barometer for writers dedicated to freedom and social change. Sadly, literary Asian mainstream U.S. liberalism has been disguised as multiculturalism. Free Palestine means uplifting Southwest Asian, North African, and Arab writers, means not placating to white supremacy and American notions of “making it” or false notions of safety. Some of the writers considered as trailblazers in Filipino poetry in the U.S. who founded key Asian literary and poetry spaces, unfortunately protect colonialism and apartheid by U.S.-Israel. The same identity does not ever equate to the same politics. 

The same identity does not ever equate to the same politics.

The literary standing and acceptance is not my primary goal but a supplementary outcome. When the Chant Comes was published at a time when trans people of color were not being published in the mainstream literary scene at all, but in queer zines, social justice anthologies, and community newsletters. At the time, I was becoming more physically disabled, and shifted from theater work to poetry because I was in bed care most of the time. When I think of Asian trans poets, it felt like me and Ryka Aoki for a minute? There’s Trish Saleh, Jai Dulani, and Gein Wong also. The Asian American Spoken Word Summit was bountiful but very, very cis and straight. I did not find affinity in that space entirely. Meanwhile, disabled poetics were incessantly white, cis, and middle-class, with the exception of Eli Clare, who was doing multi-genre writing. In Disabled poetics there was almost an absence of race and class. The tradition of poetry by Black, Indigenous, and non-Black people of color in the U.S. was based in theater and oral history practice, as even cis queer people in vulnerable literary communities did not make room. Poets like Kit Yan, Ifti Nasim, Imani Henry, Andrea Jenkins, Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, Amir Rabiyyah, J Mase III, and others, were key figures in this oral history and theater work. Trans poets moved into slam poetry, theater, direct activism organizing, mainstream political office, speculative adult fiction, library sciences, non-fiction, and/or didn’t survive. Poetry made little room for sustainability and infrastructural support. This is crucial to name. I did not think I would have had a book deal because there were no models like mine at these intersections. I was one of the few brown, trans, disabled, working class poets to publish outside of a self-published chapbook or at a literary press, as small as it was. 

What we understand today as Trans poetics and the existing opportunities and accreditation are less than a decade old. It is very new. We were not always welcome. White trans people like Trace Peterson and my mentor, TC Tolbert, are professors, and in my opinion, still not getting the exposure they deserved in their craft. Drafting When the Chant Comes, I was a Trans person newly disabled and practically immobile in bed care, which reflects my hybridization of trans ingenuity and houselessness, precarious living, and poverty on disability and worker’s comp. It was a book pulsing with scarcity and aching for the need to envision longevity. Sadly, I find this has resonated with many. Each poem was drafted while also trying to survive a viciously abusive partnership, a brutal medical complex system, and abled scrutiny from former comrades in all aspects—poetry, organizing, cultural fronts. For many of the poems, I was not writing for a future, but to have an archive in case that if I didn’t make it—a personal mission. 

Trans poets moved into slam poetry, theater, direct activism organizing, mainstream political office, speculative adult fiction, library sciences, non-fiction, and/or didn’t survive. Poetry made little room for sustainability and infrastructural support. This is crucial to name.

AMMD: In a conversation with Devonya N. Havis for Addressing Ableism (Lexington Books, 2018), queer disability justice activist Lydia X. Z. Brown, mentioned you along with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Mia Mingus, Edward Ndopu, Leroy F. Moore, Jr., Talila A. Lewis, Ki’tay Davidson, Eli Clare, s.e. smith, Shain M. Neumeier, and Nai Damato as writers and artists whom Lydia looks up to and has learned a great deal from. What about you: who are the figures and what texts have informed your writings and activism on Disability Justice?

KUB: I miss Ki’tay Davidson so much. He was foundational and reflected a Trans queer disabled goodness that I adored so deeply. I am a big fan of HEARD and all the work his partner Talila Lewis has been doing organizing with Deaf incarcerated people. Someone who is an ancestor now also is Stacey Park Milbern. Without Stacey’s direct action and earlier writing from 2008 to maybe 2012, I would not have been politicized. They really pushed the mainstream disabled movement in ways that centered queer and trans people as well as Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Both Ki’tay and Stacey defined what “revolutionary” means for so many, and so much of what we consider Disability Justice today. Disabled Poetics would be nothing without the longstanding and often overlooked contributions of Krip-hop and Leroy Moore. It is more than vital but imperative to center and celebrate the work of Patricia Berne, founder of Sins Invalid. Patty is the connection point prior to Lydia and others writing disability as justice work outside of accessibility compliance. Patty Berne is responsible for Disability Justice (DJ) as theory as praxis, and for what we understand today.  DJ prioritizes those at the helm of multiple communities who are most tangibly impacted by multiple systems of oppression. I notice it being co-opted by white people, by middle class or wealthy people, and in several cases misapplied by disabled and neuro-divergent influencers now. Please consider for reference the leading-edge text Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People, which elaborates on Disability Justice as a movement.

AMMD: Are there Trans and Queer Crip writers and artists, from the modern day to antiquity, whose works you think deserve to be known more?

KUB: I return and turn to poets like Amir Rabiyah, Aurora Levin Morales, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Eli Clare often. 

AMMD: What about Filipinx poets and writers you think the world should not miss out on?

KUB: I am going to focus on queer and trans Filipinx/Pinoy/Pinay poets in the U.S. as I think there is a distinct gap between cis straight poets and the queer poets as far as exposure. If you are asking me who I teach in this realm? I would say: Maiana Minahal, Angela Peñaredondo, Ina Cariño, Aldrin Regina Valdez, and more emerging, MT Vallarta, come immediately to mind. 

People I studied when I started who are necessary were women poets JoAnn Balingit, Gina Apostal, and Barbara Jane Reyes. For an unbelievable variety of technicality and beauty, I cannot put Aimee Nezhukumatathil ‘s books down. I love Michelle Peñaloza. Two younger poets I have started paying attention to are Dani Putney, whose book Mix Mix is coming out Spring 2025, and Malaya Ulan, who is Philadelphia Youth Poet Laureate.

AMMD: When we speak of literary intersections between transness and disability, these are territories of Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars (2016) and Imogen Binnie’s Nevada (2013). If you were to teach a course on Trans Crip Poetry & Art, what books and texts would you wish to include as key texts? At the risk of handing a syllabus on a silver platter at the expense of your academic/creative labour, can you name some writers and artists you would be inclined to incorporate to this imaginary syllabus?

KUB: I adore this question. I think I’ll turn to Audre Lorde (The Cancer Journals) and Pat Parker first. I learned disabled poetics from Eli Clare, whose white, working class, and trans perspective have always blended poetry with essay and research. Currently, poetry only on just one page isn’t my go-to.  I love uncovering art that moves in multiples and multitudes. I ask students, what is the poem doing, actively? What are the conditions and how do they incite the poem’s structure? What’s in play here and what is at risk? When I begin with that, make no mistake, hybrid poetics and Disabled poetics come to the front and center. I am interested in poetry that elaborates on sound, spatial curiosity, and the vastness of the sick and disabled experience. This might not be in a literary magazine. This might mean props or theatrical elements. It could involve video and text outside of typical pathologized understandings of any given community in conversation. Strike that, multiple communities messing with multiple conventions, forever and whenever possible. People I enjoy teaching are Joselia Rebekah Hughes (“Verbena’s Apothecary”) and JJJJJerome Ellis (“Dysfluent Waters”), who each in their own way are concerned with disability justice, and engage in interdisciplinary correspondences that are performances accentuated and housed in Black poetics. There is something new each time you revisit their work that maybe you didn’t notice before. There’s incredible hybrid poetry with video, installation, mixed media, and those poets open that up with curiosity. I find myself continuously learning from them. 

What’s in play here and what is at risk? When I begin with that, make no mistake, hybrid poetics and Disabled poetics come to the front and center.

Possibly not trans, but some non-binary, I think highlighting Black disabled and sick poets like Walela Nehanda (Bless This Blood), who writes about the deplorable tides of medical complex and treatment of Black people, and Camisha Jones (Flare), whose poems on pandemic and chronic pain feel not only resonant but spiritually affirming. A fellow Jersey poet who uses sensory play and musicality is Leslie McIntosh (“Three Epistles”). McIntosh distinctively claims Black autist approaches and further amplifies tone, lyrical, and interior progress simultaneously individual and always political. Kimberly Jae is a reckoning, and the force and the dynamism of her poetry and performance give you more than a show, but an immersion. Trans and Asian emerging poet, River Dandelion, holds familial and ancestral overlaps in reflective stanzas. If we are talking about the trans academic writing of poetry, technicians in poetry, people who hold formal and exquisite craft, I think of Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (Slingshot, Watchnight) and torrin greathouse (Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, DEED). Both are trans poets and really can’t be compared aside from polished writing and being trans; they are both planets with very different landscapes. To study means to zone and hone in the deep. 

féi hernandez writes beautiful experimental musical poetry that channels indigenous and trans deliberations. Another trans poet I love is Jimena Lucero, who brings tides of quiet to localities that are migrant and very New Yorker, smartly sewing landscape with internal tensions, trans femme and Latinx, she plays in format and syntax choices that are compelling to me while also dedicating her 9-to-5 job to disability justice. If we are talking internationally, I frequently turn to Khairani Barokka for a non-U.S. Empire lens. Barokka co-edited the Disability Justice special issue of The Massachusetts Review with Jarrell Johnson, which is also a staple I pull from often. New-ish poets who I think of in terms of disability and sickness are Arriana Monet, Elizabeth Meade, and one of my first students at Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Ashna Ali. 

AMMD: You have at least two books coming out: the poetry collection Root Systems and the essay collection Eat Good for Me. Could you tell us more about these?

KUB: Root Systems tries (and I say ‘tries’ very loosely) to enhance my themes of interconnectivity. The title hails from a poem in the collection that pushed me to think about my past, about being trans and growing up and my cultural linkages to the Filipina women who raised me. Their recipes and insights are emblematized in everything I do, even in terms of facing erasure on a multitude of fronts. That poem also incorporates natural elements of soil and farming in a cityscape. 

What brings me back? What brings trans people and sick people fighting to survive in a COVID pandemic back? To be honest, I don’t know if Root Systems is a book of accuracy of identities so much as one of loneliness faced in isolation. I am a protest and stage poet confined by the state to the space of my home, to protect others, to protect myself where the state has catastrophically failed. I know death and grief have been my forte in poetry, but now I ask, what are the gaps and overlaps between grieving and joy?  

Eat Good For Me is the title of an essay that elaborates on something my ma used to say when I first began as a poet. The full title is Eat Good for Me: An Essay on Your Late Mother’s Birthday. It turns to some epistolary elements, because that’s where I seem to go, perpetually in correspondence with the ancestors. In the 2000s, as a baby poet,  I traveled by bus and plane with the privilege to perform in several cities as my mom was either working too hard or so sick that she could not travel. There’s a sense of accomplishment in the title of this book, as someone is being fed and a sense of lineage explored. Someone is eating for more than themselves, only able to do this because they were initially nourished by others. There’s also a sadness to the idea of being able to find joy or access when others you love were not able to. This essay collection is a coming-of-age set of vignettes that explore gender and racial pride in the context of a loving yet tension-filled migrant family. This is one take of many on what happens to someone when their family faces fracture and loss. The root of the collection emphasizes how the Asian, queer, transgender, and later, disabled experiences can feel like erasure in white supremacy. Despite this, through discovery, eating, and cooking, I find ancestral ritual, remembrance, and acceptance.

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1. (an old Asian spoken word reference via I was born with 2 tongues)