Saints and Sinners Fest Queer AF Reading

Come join us at the Hotel Monteleone on Saturday evening for our annual Queer AF reading!

This special event pairs local and out-of-town writers from all writing stages and genres. This year, we are thrilled to announce that our featured readers are Rickey Laurentiis, Brad Richard, Chin-Sun Lee, Casey Dawson, Ben Fluet, who will be reading alongside five out-of-town writers. Open mic to follow, and sign ups will be first come, first served. There will be booze, there will be panache, there will be an afterparty!

Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to care. Her debut book, Boy with Thorn, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and finalized for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. They’ve partnered with the Carnegie Museum of Art and lead a conversation at the Museum of Modern Art. Fellowships from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem and the Whiting Foundation have honored her, and she was inaugural fellow at Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. Her much anticipated second collection, Death of the First Idea, was published in 2025 by Knopf and longlisted for the National Book Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a nominee for a NAACP Image Award.

Brad Richard is the author of Habitations (Portals Press, 2000), Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011), Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012), Parasite Kingdom (The Word Works, 2019), and Turned Earth (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). His 2022 chapbook, In Place, was chosen for the Robin Becker Series from Seven Kitchens Press. A second edition of Motion Studies, with additional poems and a foreword by Skye Jackson, was published by The Word Works in March, 2025. He has taught creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, The Willow School (whose creative writing program he founded and directed), Louisiana State University, and Tulane University, and for The Kenyon Review and New Orleans Writers Workshop. Series editor of the Hilary Tham Capital Collection from The Word Works, he lives, writes, and gardens in New Orleans.

Ben Fluet is a queer poet and filmmaker living in New Orleans. He is currently the Graduate Editor at University of New Orleans Press and a reader for Bayou Magazine. In 2022, he hand-bound and self-published his debut chapbook, How We Forgot to Sing. In 2020, Ben directed Meet Me By The Magnolia Tree, a documentary exploring the history of gay men’s lives in Richmond, VA, which aired on PBS and featured on Virginia Public Media. His recent writing appears or is forthcoming in the Tilted House Slender Broadside series, Otis Nebula, Trampoline, and NeoSolarZine.

Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (Unnamed Press 2023) and the forthcoming Soon You’ll Be Just Like Us (Creature Publishing 2027). She’s a contributor to the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2014). Her work has also appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Georgia Review, and Joyland, among other publications. She writes, edits, and teaches in New Orleans. www.chinsunlee.com

Casey Dawson is an occasional writer and full time pool boy at the vampire mansion from New Orleans. You can follow them on Letterboxd at @caseylikekc. You cannot follow them into the void. (Get your own.)

C. RUSSELL PRICE is the author of oh, you thought this was a date?!: Apocalypse Poems and Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other. Their newest collection Bisquick: An American Seance will be published in August 2026 by Northwestern University Press. They are a poet in residence at the Chicago Poetry Center and work with the Anarchist Review of Books. They are a Lambda Fellow, a Ragdale Fellow, Literary Death Match champion, and two—time Lit 50 honoree. Price landscapes in Chicago.

Willie Carver Jr. is a youth advocate, Kentucky Teacher of the Year, and the author of Gay Poems for Red States, a recipient of awards from Stonewall, American Library Association, World Pride, Read Appalachia, Whippoorwill, and Book Riot. His fragmented novel, Tore All to Pieces, arrives March 2026 (University Press of Kentucky). Willie’s writing has been published in textbooks, anthologies, and journals, including Testament, Discarded, Rural and Outrooted, Appalachian Journal, Southern Humanities, Louisville Review, Another Chicago, Harbor, Smoky Blue Literary, Miracle Monocle, Good River Review, Salvation South, and Gay & Lesbian Review. Willie believes everyone deserves to feel that they matter.

Katie Gilmartin believes that disconnection from the past is a kind of spiritual violence and storytelling is one way to heal. Katie (she/they) runs the Queer Ancestors Project, devoted to forging sturdy relationships between young Queer and Trans people and their ancestors through free workshops in writing and printmaking. Her illustrated noir mystery, Blackmail, My Love, won Lambda and Indiefab Gold Awards. Katie’s second novel, Vice Academy, set in the shimmering subterranean nightlife of 1950s San Francisco, illuminates the fierce, tender work of cultivating community against all odds (and is in search of a publisher).

Miah Jeffra is author of four books—most recently The Violence Almanac (finalist for several awards, including the Grace Paley and Robert C Jones Book Prizes) and the novel American Gospel, finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize—and is co-editor, with Arisa White and Monique Mero, of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart. Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press, and teaches writing, decolonial studies and cultural theory at Santa Clara University.

Writer, actor, multi-disciplinary artist, and faggotry hauntologist Sean Patrick Mulroy is an internationally recognized poet and performer. An award-winning professor, Mulroy recently completed his latest international tour of Europe and SWANA in support of his debut poetry collection, Hated for the Gods. A 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, 2018 Writer-in-Residence at The Kerouac Project in Orlando Florida, and winner of the 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, Mulroy is also an award-winning professor of writing. Born and raised in the American South, Sean has lived and worked all over the world, in over 25 countries on 4 continents. At present, he lives in New York City.

Birch Wiley is a transsexual poet living in New York. Their work can be found in Pleiades, Voicemail Poems, and Querencia Quarterly, among others. Their debut collection, Mythweaver, was published by new words {press}. You can learn more about them at birchwiley.com.