event poster
UoNARI is delighted to invite everyone to join for an evening of trans creativity, performance, and history-making.
Featuring three trans scholar-artists, Remi Graves, Jaya Jacobo and CN Lester, in discussion with historian, Onni Gust, this event will look at what it means to be trans, to research and tell trans stories for the present and future.
The event will include poetry and spoken word. All are welcome!
For any enquires please email Dr Onni Gust.
CN Lester – scholar, musician, activist and author of Trans Like Me (2017/2018). They are the founder and artistic director of arts event Transpose at Barbican, and work internationally as a musician and a trans/queer/feminist educator, writer, speaker, and activist. Words and music at BBC Radio 3 and 4, Newsnight, ITV, The Guardian, SBS, Sydney Opera House, Southbank Centre, Royal Exchange, The Arts Club, and arts and book festivals/radio/print worldwide. They hold an interdisciplinary performance/research PhD on the composer Barbara Strozzi: research/teaching areas include the history of gender and gendered impacts on musical production/reception. They made their fiction debut with the 2023 collection Furies, alongside Margaret Atwood, Ali Smith, and Emma Donoghue. They're currently working on two trans historical works (fiction and non-fiction), their next album, and their next opera.
Jaya Jacobo - a scholar, critic and artist of the global southern transfeminine of colour experience. Her creative and critical collaborations with Afro-indigenous travesti and transsexual women in Brazil have been supported by the UKRI and Research England. Jaya’s poetic work has been featured in Club Até’s Ultra-Unreal for the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Sydney, in Bhenji Ra’s Spirit Fight Club 4 at the University of Tasmania and alongside Joshua Serafin’s VOID at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Arasahas, her debut volume of poetry in Filipino published by Savage Mind is being translated into English by Christian Jil Benitez and Leo Fernandez Almero. In Germany this year, she will be a featured poet at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry Berlin and the Frankfurt Buchnesse.
Remi Graves - a London based poet and drummer, whose work has been featured on BBC Radio 4, at the Barbican and St Paul's Cathedral, and in Pan Macmillan's She is Fierce Anthology. Remi has performed at Cheltenham Literature Festival, Tate Modern and more, and their debut pamphlet ‘with your chest’ was published in 2022 by fourteen poems. Remi has led courses at The Poetry School and facilitates in schools and community spaces around London.
This event is taking place at Djanogly Recital Hall, Lakeside Arts, University Blvd, Nottingham, NG7 2RD. The closest tram stop is 'University of Nottingham'.
This event is co-sponsored by UoNARI in conjunction with the Department of History, University of Nottingham.