This queer showcase will keep you on the edge of your seat with daring and hilarious poetry focused on queer life and love from talented writers. There will also be books and limited edition ephemera for sale afterwards! This event is free and open to lovers of literature, video games, pop culture, love, and queer narratives <3. Come thru!
they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown is a momentous debut, tracking a self-proclaimed antihero’s quest for liberation via the transformative ritual of writing through the past, present, and future. Influenced by video game worlds, choose-your-own adventures, and a multifaceted collective of Mesopotamian goddesses, this collection is a conjuring of selves encountered through gender who arise to meet one another in all their Black queer joy and rage.
FEATURING:
✦ dezireé a. brown
✦ Kemi Alabi
✦ Rob Macaisa
✦ Noa Micaela Fields
✦ Em Williamson
Doors open at 6pm and our event begins at 7pm. Dorothy remains open after the event until 11pm.
Please note: RSVPs are free but are not required to attend the event. RSVPs serve as calendar reminders and attendance expectaions for our staff.
Dorothy is 21+ and requires physical or mobile ID for all to enter. Dorothy is also ADA accessible with elevator access on Campbell Ave. If you are a guest who requires elevator access, please wait by the black door with our logo on the window and call our staff to assist: 773-770-3799
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ABOUT THE PERFORERS
Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025), winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award and longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the verse drama My Love is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). A 2026 Creative Capital, 2025 NEA, and 2024 Ruth Lilly fellow, he serves as the managing poetry editor at Foglifter and lives in Chicago.
Em Williamson (they/them) is a trans-nonbinary writer who lives in Chicago. Their fiction has appeared in journals like Puerto del Sol, New Delta Review, storySouth, among numerous others, and their scholarship appears in the journal Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Their work has received support from Ragdale, Tin House, and has been nominated for an AWP Intro Award and an Illinois Arts Council Award. Their short story collection Palace was a finalist for Sundress Publications' 2024 Prose Contest and the 2025 Howling Bird Press Prize. They have their PhD in Creative Writing from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Kemi Alabi (they/them) is the author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. The collection was a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, Chicago Review of Books Award winner, and one of New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, among other honors. Alabi is the inaugural Beloit Poetry Journal Iron Mouth Curatorial Fellow, and their poems have appeared widely including in The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, Boston Review, and the Grammy-nominated album Difficult Grace. Born in Wisconsin on a Sunday in July, they now live in Chicago, IL.
Noa Micaela Fields (she/her) aka Nomi is an echodeviant enjambment queen (translation: trans poet with hearing aids) in search of the hypervivid in her one and only captionless life. She is the author of E (Nightboat Books, 2026), an alterbook embracing the poetic glitch of mishearing as a subversive technology of transformation. Born in California, she now lives in Chicago, where she curates events at the Poetry Foundation and edits poetry for Chrysalis, a literary magazine by and for trans youth. Website: doyounoapoet.com.
dr. dez brown (they/he), publishing as dezireé a. brown, is a Black queer nonbinary and transmasculine Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and interdisciplinary scholar, born and raised in Flint, MI. Their debut collection of poetry, they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming, was the winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize and a finalist for the 2026 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Often claiming to have been born with a poem written across his chest, he spends much of his time gaming and plays a mean hand of spades. Follow them online at @deziree.the.writer.