Meet the Artists of Sister Spit, the Roving Queer Performance Art Show

This spring, Sister Spit will celebrate its 23rd year on the road.

Co-created by Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson as an all-girl poetry roadshow, the tour was reinvented in 2007 as Sister Spit: The Next Generation. The show now features people of all genders, shifting its focus to queer and trans artists of color. Famous alumni include Eileen Myles, Dorothy Allison, Justin Vivian Bond, Ali Liebegott, and Chinaka Hodge.

The 2020 tour will feature Ananya Garg, Creatrix Tiara, Dena Rod, librecht baker, Mia S. Willis, and Nitram Nadroj. All chosen because they honor the tour's historic vibe of feminism, queerness, humor, and provocation.

Sister Spit is a part of Radar Productions, a Bay Area queer literary arts organization creating and supporting a community of queer artists through commissioning, developing and presenting ground-breaking literary work.

Junauda Petrus

Junauda Petrus is a writer, pleasure activist, filmmaker, runaway witch, cosmic bag lady and performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born on Dakota land. She creates performance and written work centering in wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, an experimental arts production company.

Petrus is currently writing and directing, Sweetness of Wild, a poetic-episodic film series themed around Blackness, queerness, biking, resistance, love and coming of age in Minneapolis. Her first young adult novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them, debuts September 2019 on Dutton Children's. It's about queer, Black diasporic love, mass incarceration, astrology, ancestral magic, Whitney Houston, and trusting the sacredness of your existence despite oppression and heartbreak. She lives in Minneapolis with her wife and magically aquarian, bonus-daughter.

Creatrix Tiara

Creatrix Tiara (pronouns: Tiara, or they/them) works with creative arts & media, technology, games, community cultural development, and education to explore ideas around community, identity, liminality, belonging, and social justice. Tiara is very interested in exploring the ways that various mediums can be used to convey and support experiences of transience and flux while also building empathy and understanding for experiences and stories outside one's own.

In 2018 Creatrix Tiara wrote, produced, and performed in their first full-length theatre show, Queer Lady Magician, exploring stage magic through a queer, feminist, decolonial lens. Tiara also performs and produces for LGBTQIA+ disability arts collective Quippings, was a Dandy Minion and Burlesque Dancer in the 2017 Melbourne Festival production of Taylor Mac's 24 Decade History of Popular Music, produced and performed for San Francisco South Asian women's theatre program Yoni Ki Baat, and has made work across US, Australia, and elsewhere.

Ananya Garg

Ananya Garg is a young queer Indian poet and spoken word performance artist. She sees her QTPOC arts community as a central force in her healing process and hopes her words can be a part of your healing. She attended the University of Washington where she studied Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies & Comparative History of Ideas, with minors in Anthropology & Diversity. You can find her working as an Educator with the Washington Building Leaders of Change Seattle Freedom Schools at Rainier Beach High School. She is also a poet/performance/teaching artist in the Seattle area.

Mia S. Willis

Mia S. Willis is a Black performance poet from Charlotte, North Carolina. Their work has been featured by or is forthcoming in FreezeRay, Curating Alexandria, WORDPEACE, Peculiar, Foothill, Button Poetry, and Slamfind. Mia's poem "hecatomb." won the 2018 Foothill Editors' Prize and earned nominations for a 2018 Pushcart Prize as well as for inclusion in Best New Poets 2018. They ranked fourth out of 96 femme poets at the 2018 Women of the World Poetry Slam, placed fifth out of 150 poets at the 2018 Southern Fried Poetry Slam, won the 2018 Feminine Empowerment Movement Slam Tournament as a member of Team Tender Bitch, and recently became the first two-time Capturing Fire Slam Champion (2018, 2019).

Mia was also named a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry as well as the 2019 Young Artist Fellow at ChaShaMa's ChaNorth residency in Pine Plains, NY. Their debut poetry collection, monster house., was the 2018 winner of the Cave Canem Foundation's Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize.

Nitram Nadroj

Nitram Nadroj is a black queer/trans interdisciplinary musician, poet/rock-critic, and artist that works under several aliases including Jordan Martin, Martin Jordan, Marta Helm, Broken Social Queen, and Daphne. Their work is often textual, musical, and experimental involving small and large scale elements of dance, play, collaboration, and interaction.

Their book, S.O. S. (Some Oscillations Suck!): Collected Poetic Rock Criticism With Translations in Morse Code was published by C.E.E. Press & Label (2018) and their forthcoming book/record, Psychosocialite will be published via the experimental label Crystal Visions in 2020. Their work has been performed at Performance Space NY, Sophiensaele (Berlin), Cooper Union, Wexner Center For The Arts, and La MaMa Theatre.

Dena Rod

Dena Rod is a writer, editor, and poet based in the Bay Area. They run the RADAR Productions weblog and are the Assistant Creative Nonfiction Editor at homology lit, and the Managing Editor of Argot Literary Magazine, a queer non-profit with a mission to highlight and sponsor LGBQTIAA+ perspectives and art across the globe.

They were selected for RADAR Productions' Show Us Your Spines Residency, Kearny Street Workshop's Interdisciplinary Writer's Lab, and Winter Tangerine's Summer Writer's Workshop. Through creative nonfiction essays and poetry, Dena works to illuminate their diasporic experiences of Iranian American heritage and queer identity, combating negative stereotypes of their intersecting identities in the mainstream media.

librecht baker

librecht baker is the author of vetiver (Finishing Line Press). She's an English professor, a Sundress Publications' Assistant Editor, and was part of The Vagrancy's 2018-2019 Playwrights' Group and Eastside Queer Stories Festival 2019 and 2017. baker has attended Ragdale, VONA/Voices, and Lambda Literary Writer's Retreat. she has a MFA from Goddard College. Her poetry appears in Solace: Writing Refuge, & LGBTQ Women of Color, Bone Bouquet (Issue 8.1), Sinister Wisdom 107, and other publications. Baker's play, Lineage Undone, was awarded Top Performance in the "Top Papers and Performances in Performance Studies" category at Western States Communication Association's 89th Convention.