Bridget Gordon
Temperance Aghamohammadi
Amari Amai
Lillian Melody
Ellis
Join us for an evening of trans poetics.
Even as our lives are under siege by a violent and racist empire, trans people continue to live extraordinary lives and make art that reflects those lives. On Trans Day of Visibility, a small collection drawn from Chicago’s thriving collective of trans poets will perform their work for and with their community.
Temperance Aghamohammadi weaves ancient magick to cast down the violent borders that separate us. Lillian Melody keens a song of grief and yearning, served with a cup of all-night diner coffee. Amari Amai bends time and memory to point the way to a better world. Ellis takes the ephemerality of desire and transmutes it into an embodied experience. Bridget Gordon, also your host for the evening, writes love letters to futures that never happened.
7PM Doors / 7:30 Performances
$15 ($10 w/ Student ID) - Tickets Available at the Door
Artist Bios
Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite. An Iranian American poet, medium, and critic, she is the author of BATTALION SHAPED GIRL. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New England Review, Passages North, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
Amari Amai is a Black transmasculine storyteller and worldbuilder born and raised in Chicago. As a Great Migration baby with roots in Jackson, Mississippi, Amari’s work is rooted in oral tradition and ancestral embodiment on and off the page, using poetry, folklore, soundscapes, and performance to bend time and add texture to forgotten histories and lived experiences of Black trans folks. Their work has received support and fellowships from Tin House, Periplus Collective, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Chicago Poetry Center, The Watering Hole, Vermont Studio Center, and Earthseed Black Family Archive Project. Amari is the founder of Crossroads Writers Collective, a communal writing group for Black queer folks based in Chicago. As a 2025 Pushcart Prize and 2025 Best Small Fictions Nominee, they are currently at work on their debut poetry collection, with poems published and forthcoming in beestung magazine, Verse Daily, Epiphany Literary Magazine, and Callaloo Journal.
Ellis, also known as Ellis D, is a poet and bb burlesquer in Chicago. A romantic, a goofball, and a gender-fluid freak, Ellis loves to write about transness, love, and sex.
Bridget Gordon is a queer trans woman and emerging poet based in Chicago. A former MFA student and sports journalist, her current work with poetry and short-form writing is enraptured with queer longing, identity, and liminality. Fae has past and upcoming publications in Moist Poetry Journal, TRANS MAG, Pink Poetry Club, and Coin-Operated Press. Her debut poetry collection, the rest is up to you, love, will be released in Summer 2026. Fae lives with her husband, metamour, cats, and a growing TBR pile.
Lillian Melody is an editor and writer and a million other things because she says yes to too much stuff. she’s been published by publishers weekly and two different body horror anthologies and a bunch of little poetry outlets that don’t exist anymore. she lives with her two boyfriends and three cats in chicago and plays bass in weaklung, a noise punk band. her favorite golden girl is rose, obviously.