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.
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. 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 Addie Tsai.
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, coming August 2025 from Tor Books. Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
Dominique Dickey is a speculative fiction writer and game designer. As the creative director of Sly Robot Games, they’ve created Plant Girl Game and Tomorrow on Revelation III. They contributed to the Nebula Award-winning Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and the ENNIE Award-winning Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. Their short fiction has appeared in venues including Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Nightmare Magazine. Their novella Redundancies & Potentials is now available from Neon Hemlock Press. They live in the DC area, where they’re always on the hunt for their next idea.
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 trans writer and librarian living in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in smoke and mold, ANMLY, Bright Wall/Dark Room, MQR Mixtape, and more. He was a finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. In his free time, Luke helps organize a trans writing group that aims to build queer literary community in DC. He co-founded Lilac Peril with Andrea Morgan, a small D.C. publisher and literary journal that centers trans writers and poets.
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.
* The programs and services offered by George Mason University are open to all who seek them. George Mason does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. After an initial review of its policies and practices, the university affirms its commitment to meet all federal mandates as articulated in federal law, as well as recent executive orders and federal agency directives.
