Day of Transgender Literature: Prose, Poetry and Community Writing Workshop
Thursday, November 20, 2025 12:00 PM to 4:15 PM EST
Fenwick Library, #2001 and 4010
Celebrate transgender voices with a day of readings, panels, and a community writing workshop. The series of events will include readings and discussions from Charlie Jane Anders, K. Iver, Dominique Dickey, Luke Sutherland, Emily Holland, Andrea Abi-Karam, Amir Rabiyah, Addie Tsai and Andrew Joseph White. Fenwick Gallery will also have photobooks by transgender women and nonbinary artists on display during the day as part of their How We Saw What They Saw exhibition.
12:00 p.m. Prose Panel featuring Charlie Jane Anders, Dominique Dickey, Luke Sutherland, and Andrew Joseph White
Fenwick Main Reading Room, #2001
Explore the transgender experience with readings and discussion from speculative fiction, table-top role playing game, and flash narrative writers.
1:30 p.m. Poetry Panel featuring Andrea Abi-Karam, Emily Holland, K. Iver, and Amir Rabiyah
Fenwick Main Reading Room, #2001
Enjoy poetry readings and a discussion of poetry’s unique capacity for illuminating the transgender experience.
3:00 p.m. Subversive Retellings: Community Writing Workshop Moderated by Addie Tsai
Fenwick 4010
Join us for creative writing and fellowship as we create new works of literature in a community writing workshop moderated by poet, novelist, and scholar Addie Tsai. RSVPs for workshop encouraged but not required.
5:00 p.m TDOR Vigil
J.C. Bistro
During Mason’s 2025 observance of Transgender Day of Remembrance, the LGBTQ+ Resources Center and the Center for Leadership and Intercultural Engagement will hold a vigil to acknowledge the losses of our last year and spread awareness about the continued violence against trans and non-binary folks.
Featured Writers
Andrea Abi-Karam is a trans, SWANA, punk poet-performer cyborg. They are the author of EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), Villainy (Nightboat Books, Sept 2021), & with Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). They are currently writing a poet's novel about crushes & a murder mystery.
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, a novel about a young woman who teaches her heartbroken mother how to be a witch. Bookseller Julie Goodrich with Beaverdale Books called it "one of my favorite books of the decade... a truly gorgeous story of love and heartbreak." Charlie Jane also wrote Never Say You Can't Survive, a guide to using creative writing to get through tough times.
Dominique Dickey is the author of the novella Redundancies & Potentials. Their short fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and other venues. They are the creative director of Sly Robot Games, a D.C.-based indie press that makes tabletop roleplaying games about community, struggle, and finding hope in difficult circumstances. You can find their work at dominiquedickey.com.
Emily Holland (they/she) is a genderqueer lesbian writer living in Baltimore, MD. Their debut collection of poems, NOTIFICATIONS ON, won the 2025 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers' Publishing House and will be published in January 2027. Their work appears in publications including HAD, Shenandoah, DIALOGIST, Little Patuxent Review, and Black Warrior Review. In 2023, they served as the Chair of Outwrite, DC’s LGBTQIA+ literary festival. She currently teaches creative writing at the George Washington University. They are also the Executive Editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal, and the Communications Manager at The Writer’s Center.
K. Iver was born in Mississippi. Their debut collection Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions, selected by Tyehimba Jess. Short Film is a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Lambda Literary Awards and has been named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Public Library. Iver has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from Florida State University. They are the Roger F. Murray Chair in Creative Writing at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA.
Amir Rabiyah is a disabled, multi-racial poet and rabble-rouser. Their creative work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Amir is the co-editor of Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices and Prayers for my 17th Chromosome, an ALA Over the Rainbow Pick, and a Finalist in the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender Variant Literature. For their day job, Amir works as a librarian and instructor in Philadelphia.
Addie Tsai (any/all) is the author of Dear Twin (2019), included in American Library Association’s Rainbow List in 2021, Unwieldy Creatures (2022), a Shirley Jackson finalist for Best Novel, and Straight White Men Can’t Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture (2025). She collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. They are the founding editor in chief for just femme & dandy. Addie is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at William & Mary, where she is Affiliate Faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Asian and Pacific Islander American Studies.
Luke Sutherland is a writer, librarian, and publisher on Piscataway lands, so-called Washington D.C. His chapbook Distance Sequence won the 2023 OutWrite Chapbook Contest, published by Neon Hemlock Press. He is an editor at smoke + mold and co-founder of the trans small press Lilac Peril. Find him online as @lukejsuth or @lilacperil.
Andrew Joseph White is the bestselling, award-winning author of horror novels for teens and adults, including Hell Followed With Us, You Weren't Meant to Be Human, and more. Born and raised in the Shenandoah Valley, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University, and lives in Virginia with his wife and their antisocial cat.
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