"Finding shelter"
He built a house around him made of sticks and wood
and a sheet from the hall closet that mother told him no.
And he went to grab one from the dryer,
and his brother said, "Mom will kill you," and Peter said, "Good, let her."
Because the thing about Peter is he was never afraid.
He built a house around him made of cardboard and wood from the garage.
And his father never blew it down,
even though it shivered when Peter crawled out of it and said,
"Look, Dad. Look what I made."
And his father got down on one knee and said,
"Son, you can't fit your life into tiny boxes."
One memory that really sticks out to me
is when I was about six years old,
and there was another boy in my first grade class
who had gotten a tap dancing solo.
And he was very excited to tell the rest of our classmates.
And the rest of the kids in my class, unfortunately, started making fun of him.
So little six-year-old me, with all the voice I can muster
stomped her foot and said, "Hey, tap dancing boys are cool."
And what sticks out about this memory
isn't the fact that I thought tap dancing boys were cool,
but it was the fact that I was a very timid child,
and I couldn't even stand up for my own self,
yet here I was, standing up for some other boy in my class.
Little background: I didn't grow up in a very traditional household.
My mom was the only mother at Girl Scouts with a Mohawk.
Both of my parents were artists,
and you could very much say that I was not a child who fit into
any sense of what we would call the norm.
So, needless to say, I got made fun of: a lot.
And I didn't have very many friends.
But, in order to deal with that, I read a lot.
And I became friends with characters in books.
I became friends with Hermione Granger and Junie B. Jones and many more.
And all of this reading inspired me
to want to become a writer from a very young age.
And as a writer, I focused mostly on queer youth narrative.
I'm going to break this down:
queer meaning people, characters, or voices
that don't identify as heterosexual or cisgender,
meaning not identifying as the gender that you were assigned at birth.
And in my writing,
I focus on the ages between 11 and 10, as young as that,
or as old as 25 and 26.
And we all know that reading is often associated with this form of escapism.
A lot of us use reading to escape our reality.
I did. I'm sure many of you did as well.
And, there's another form of escapism in the time that we live in,
which is celebrity culture.
You know, and we live in a time where we can go online
and find out anything we want to know about any singer, actor, entertainer
In a matter of seconds.
And it's wonderful that we have out queer celebrities
who are active within the community.
We have Neil Patrick Harris, we have Ellen DeGeneres,
we are also, luckily, live in a time
where we have queer characters on television.
We have Mitch and Cam from Modern Family, Callie and Arizona from Grey's Anatomy,
and both lists continue to go on.
But the difference between queer youth narrative and celebrity culture,
there's a big difference.
In celebrity culture, you have these stories of these older celebrities,
but a lot of their coming out stories are from 20 years ago
--so they're not experiencing it now--
and their experience may be very different because of the time that they lived in.
Whereas queer youth literature, in a book, the character never ages.
Harry Potter was always 14 in Goblet of Fire,
and will continue to be 14 for the next 20 years.
He doesn't age in that book.
Also the fact you don't often hear about
young people coming out in the public eye.
You don't hear about young celebrities coming out of the closet.
And there's a couple reasons for that.
Often they get brushed under the rug,
and they don't come out until they're much older,
or they come out in the public eye
and authority figures do not respect their identity.
Their authenticity is often questioned and doubted.
And for a young person to hear that from an authority figure:
a parent, a relative, or even a stranger on the street,
it makes you think,
"Well, if they don't respect this famous person's identity,
how can they respect mine?"
And the age thing and the experience,
experience and having them coincide,
having someone around your age experience the same thing you are;
you can connect.
They can be inspired by the stories of Neil Patrick Harris and Ellen DeGeneres,
but they can't connect.
And it's a necessity to be able to connect.
So that they can move forward in their lives
and feel as if there is someone else going through the same thing they are.
I decided to become a writer at a very young age.
I was about 13, and at the time, I was still reading a lot.
And I read a mixture of voices: queer voices, non-queer voices,
and I was lucky enough to have access to all of these different types of voices.
And deciding to be a writer at a very young age,
I was going through a very difficult time.
And these books were helping me
get though questioning my identity
and discovering who I was as a young person
In my more formative years.
And I made the decision because I had felt this obligation,
I felt an obligation to my future readers,
that I needed to give back this sense of hope and longing that reading gave me.
Which is why I started writing "Peter and the Concrete Jungle".
"Peter and the Concrete Jungle" is a project
that I've been working on for about 6 months,
and it's a collection of poetry divided into two parts.
The first half are all third person poems about Peter, a trans man,
and his experience through his childhood, and his transition, and his adulthood.
And the second half is about Wendy, a young queer woman,
through her childhood and her experience coming out,
and their relationship together.
And the reason I started writing it was to create this understanding
for people who may not be familiar with the struggles of the LGBT community
to be able to understand and empathize with these characters.
So I played a lot with visual form and language.
All of Peter's poems are right-hand justified,
all of his poems in his section.
And many of you are probably not used to reading on the right-hand side of the page
and it would probably be very uncomfortable.
That discomfort is to mimic the sense of discomfort
that he feels within himself through much of his life.
All of Wendy's poems, while they're all left-hand justified as we may be used to,
all of her poems are a little more chaotic.
There are no form poems, and most other poems lack punctuation
because her experience, unlike Peter's, is a little bit more chaotic,
and a little bit more disastrous.
And as I was writing this project,
I brought some poems to my professor to review them,
and she said to me and my classmates,
"There aren't many voices like this out there.
And this really needs to turn into something much bigger."
And it did.
And while I was writing it, I felt this excitement
about writing it and being closed to finishing it,
but at the same time, I felt this frustration and anger
and I was very upset because it's not that there wasn't a lack of queer voices,
it's just that they weren't talked about.
they weren't accessible to everybody, they weren't respected.
And I continued writing, pursuing that, pursuing this connection
not just with the LGBT community, but with a larger community of readers.
And we all have these connections:
to each other, to characters in books from our childhood,
to characters in books we may have read last week.
And maybe if we listen to these connections,
we would be able to understand
that it's a necessity to have this variation of voices,
and that all of these voices should be respected and listened to
because these voices all give us the sense of understanding,
of longing, of hope that we need to keep going as people.
And should we listen to these voices,
maybe we could change and have an impact on each other,
and on the world,
But only if we pick up the book, and listen to the voice long enough.
"Grocery shopping"
His hands corrode the wheel with the sweat of ancient summers.
I can't tell if the slick water lines are rivers
leading from his temples or just under his eyes.
We put away the oranges, the bananas, the whole wheat bread.
I don't want to talk about it.
And he wrings a dishrag between his wrists and thumbs
mourning a conversation that's just at the corner of his mouth.
The cheese goes in the shelf.
"That's where it always goes," he says, "And where it always will be."
He pulls out two slices, kills the last of the rice milk;
tells me not to throw away the juice.
Not yet.
And he pours me a glass as he examines the date again.
Garage sale plates clank on the table from his mother's.
I don't want to talk about it.
And I comply, and he pats his chest twice to feel its still there.
Thank you.
(Applause)