Kit Yan is a queer, transgender, and Chinese-American award-winning poet. He also writes plays and screenplays. Yan lives in New York.
Kit Yan is a queer, transgender, and Chinese-American award-winning poet. He also writes plays and screenplays. Yan lives in New York.
Yan was born in Enping, China. As an infant, he moved to Hawaii and lived on Oahu until he was 18. [1] He moved to Massachusetts to attend Babson College, graduating in 2006.
Yan is a 2019 Vivace Award winner; Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow; 2019 Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Writer in residence; a 2019 MacDowell Colony Fellow; 2019-2020 Musical Theater Factory Makers Fellow; a 2019-2020 The Playwrights' Center Many Voices Fellow; and a 2019 National Alliance for Musical Theater (NAMT) selection for Interstate.
Yan has worked with collaborator Melissa Li on a production of Interstate at Mixed Blood Theatre Company in March 2020, a first draft commission of Miss Step from 5th Avenue Theatre, and a commission from Keen Company for a Keen Teens one act musical.
In 2017, Yan, MJ Kaufman, and Cece Suazo found Translab, an incubator for transgender and non-binary voices in the American Theater supported by WP Theater and Public Theater. [2]
Yan wrote Interstate, an Asian-American pop-rock poetry musical. The story centers around Dash, a transgender spoken word performer, and his best friend Adrian, a lesbian singer-songwriter. As an activist musical duo, they become internet-famous and embark on cross-America tour. Their political and personal music touches Henry, a transgender teenage boy in a small Kentucky town. He finds solace in their art while struggling with his own identity and family. Consequently, Henry becomes a video blogger, documenting his own gender journey. He sets out on a quest to meet his heroes in person, hoping to find answers to his own struggles. Interstate tells the story of two transgender people at different stages of their journey and how they navigate love, family, masculinity, and finding a community in the social media era.
Interstate won 5 awards at the 2018 New York Musical Festival, including Best Lyrics.
Residencies:
Miss Step is a heartfelt 80s dance musical comedy featuring a transgender/non-binary (TGNB) cast, live aerobics, stunts, competition, and exercise. Yan wrote a classic underdog story that portrays TGNB people as ordinary and extraordinary, defying all odds to sing, dance, compete, dazzle audiences, and find family in the most unexpected places.
Residencies:
T(estosterone) follows two trans and gender non-conforming friends on a trip to Planned Parenthood as one gets on and the other gets off testosterone. Yan asks whether testosterone is the holy grail of (trans)masculinity or just another drug? Hormones can be magical, alchemical. Rubbing gel on the chest and arms once a day or a weekly shot can transform a body. Access, quality, and outcome, however, are not evenly distributed. T is an investigation into real trans lives and the oversimplified narratives that surround testosterone as hormone replacement therapy.
Residencies:
Mr. Transman tells the story of Ariel, a moody trans/non-binary person in recovery, who unknowingly is entered into an alternative beauty pageant. To win, they must perform in a gender they're struggling to understand and compete against their most hated ex-romantic partner.
Residencies:
Queer Heartache is Yan's award-winning one-person slam poetry theater show. It relates the resilience of queer love in all its forms—like between cis and trans siblings, lovers, and pride parade attendees — in the face of societal and medical treatment barriers.
Queer Heartache won a combined total of five awards at the Chicago Fringe Festival and San Francisco Fringe Festival.
Produced at the American Repertory Theater; Diversionary Theater; IRT Theater, The Brick Theater Transgender Theater Festival; San Francisco Fringe Festival; Chicago Fringe Festival; and on eight national college tours.
Yan and Jess X. Snow wrote and produced After Earth.
As rising sea levels threaten the loss of their motherland in Hawaii, the Philippines, China and North America, four women fight to preserve the volcano, ocean, land, and air for future generations in an immersive three-channel documentary created by a majority LGBTQIA cast and crew of queer Asian/Pacific Islander elders and youth.
Safe Among Stars was produced and co-written by Yan and Jess X. Snow.
A queer Chinese-American woman struggles to tell her immigrant mother why she left school. She teleports into her own galaxy where no violence can touch her.
Queer Heartache is a full length poetry collection (TransGenre Press, 2016) adapted from Yan's award-winning one-person slam poetry theater show. Yan’s poetry explores his identity as transgender, queer, Asian American from Hawaii, asking what makes queer hearts and families and what forces constantly work to break them apart.
Yan's first solo slam poetry show, Queer Heartache, premiered at the 2015 International Chicago Fringe Theater Festival.
GLAAD featured Yan in the Trans People Speak series in 2012. [3]
Yan spoke at the 2009 National Equality March. [4] He was a featured speaker at the True Colors Youth Conference, the New England People of Color Conference, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Yan and his collaborator Melissa Li won the inaugural Vivace Award for Musical Theater.
In 2015, the Chicago Fringe Festival honored him with three awards: The Audience Choice; Artist's Pick; and Spirit of Fringe. In 2016, Yan won the Best of Fringe and the Volunteer's Choice awards at the San Francisco Fringe Festival.
His poetry has been reviewed in New York Magazine, Bitch Magazine, Curve Magazine, and Hyphen. It has been featured in the anthologies Flicker and Spark, Glitter and Grit, and Troubling the Line.
Yan won the first annual Mr. Transman competition in 2010. [5]
Cherríe Moraga is an influencial Chicana feminist writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. A prominent figure in Chicana literature and feminist theory, Moraga's work explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class, with particular emphasis on the experiences of Chicana and Indigenous women. She currently serves as Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Adam Rapp is an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, musician and film director. His play Red Light Winter was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2006.
Scott Turner Schofield is an American actor, writer, producer, and speaker. He is a transgender activist, and uses he/him and they/them pronouns. He was the first out transgender actor in Daytime television, and the first out trans man to earn an Emmy nomination for acting.
The Theater Offensive is a Boston-based theatrical organization dedicated to the production of queer works. The Theater Offensive was founded in 1989 by Abraham Rybeck "to present the diversity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lives in art so bold it breaks through personal isolation, challenges the status quo, and builds thriving communities." The Theater Offensive mounts and produces festivals and individual productions by national and local queer performers, and also serves as a development environment for new theatrical work. In addition, The Theater Offensive works to build community through education, outreach, and political activism.
Joan Larkin is an American poet, playwright, and writing teacher. She was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing explosion of the 1970s, co-founding the independent publishing company Out & Out Books. The science fiction writer Donald Moffitt was her brother.
Buck Angel is an American sex educator and former pornographic film actor and producer. He founded the media production company Buck Angel Entertainment. Angel is a transsexual man. He currently works as an advocate and educator. Angel served on the board of directors of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation from 2010 to 2016. The Foundation works to affirm sexual freedom as a fundamental human right through advocacy and education.
Lauren Gunderson is an American playwright, screenwriter, and short story author, born in Atlanta. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches playwriting. Gunderson was recognized by American Theatre magazine as America's most produced living playwright at Theatre Communications Group member theaters in 2017, and again in 2019–20.
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a published poet, performer, educator, food writer, cultural strategist, and transgender, gender non-conforming, and disability advocate based in New York and New Jersey, whose work has been showcased nationally and internationally. Their second book, More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature Finalist. They are a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship recipient, three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. Barrett's writing and performance centers on the experience of queer, transgender, people of color, mixed race people, Asian, and Filipino/a/x community. The focus of their artistic work navigates multiple systems of oppression in the context of the U.S.
Kristoffer Díaz is an American playwright, screenwriter, and educator. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. The play gave him the Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Play and the New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award. In 2024 he received a nomination at the Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Musical with Alicia Keys for Off-Broadway production Hell's Kitchen.
Sean Dorsey is a Canadian-American transgender and queer choreographer, dancer, writer and trans rights activist. He is widely recognized as the United States' first acclaimed transgender modern dance choreographer. Dorsey founded his San Francisco-based dance company Sean Dorsey Dance, which incorporates transgender and LGBTQ+ themes into all of their works. Dorsey is also the founder and artistic director of Fresh Meat Productions, a non-profit organization. Fresh Meat Productions creates and commissions new work, presents performing arts programs, conducts education and engagement, and advocates for justice and equity in the Arts. The organization hosts Fresh Meat Festival in San Francisco, an annual festival of transgender and queer performance.
Paul Lucas was an American playwright and producer based in New York City. He was best known for his play, Trans Scripts, Part I: The Women, which won a Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and a High Commendation from Amnesty International for Freedom of Expression, and was performed by the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University.
Shakina Nayfack is an American actress and transgender activist. She is most notable for her series regular role as Lola, a "trans-truther", on the second and third seasons of the Hulu television program Difficult People, on which she was also a writing consultant. In 2020, she became the first trans person to have a starring role on a major network comedy show, Connecting.
Harrison David Rivers is an American playwright. Rivers' work has won him the Relentless Award, a GLAAD Media Award, a McKnight Fellowship for Playwrights, a Jerome Foundation Many Voices Fellowship, an Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship, a Van Lier Fellowship and the New York Stage & Film's Founders Award. He is based in Saint Paul, Minnesota and is married to Christopher Bineham.
Travis Alabanza is a British performance artist, writer and theatre maker.
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a bilingual Puerto Rican poet who writes in Spanish and English, focusing on the experience of being a migrant to the United States, the colonial status of Puerto Rico, and of identifying as a queer Puerto Rican and Philadelphian of non-binary gender. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and was selected as the fourth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2018. He currently lives in Puerto Rico.
Kim Villagante, known professionally, Kimmortal, is a queer Filipino-Canadian musician, singer-songwriter and visual artist based in Vancouver.
Hansol Jung is a South Korean translator and playwright. Jung is a recipient the Whiting Award in drama and three of her plays were listed on the 2015 Kilroys' List. Jung is a member of the Ma-Yi Theater Writers' Lab and was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. In addition to writing several plays, Jung has also written for the television series Tales Of the City.
Raphael Khouri Is a Jordanian queer, transgender documentary playwright, journalist, activist, and theatre artist.
Holden Madagame is an American (Odawa) opera tenor and trans activist.
Chrysanthemum Tran is a Vietnamese American poet, writer, and performer based in Rhode Island.