Pamela Sneed | |
|---|---|
 Sneed reads on The Laura Flanders Show in 2018 | |
| Alma mater | The New School Long Island University |
| Notable work | Funeral Diva |
| Awards | Lambda Literary Award |
Pamela Sneed is an American poet, performance artist, [1] [2] actress, activist, and teacher. Her book, Funeral Diva, is a memoir in poetry and prose about growing up during the AIDS crisis, and the winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. [3]
Sneed earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lang College at The New School and a Masters of Fine Arts degree in New Media Art and Performance in 2008 at Long Island University. [4]
Sneed has held readings and performances at Center Stage at the Studio Museum in Harlem, P.S. 122, Creative Time @ The Brooklyn Anchorage, Exit Art, Lincoln Center Ex-Teresa in Mexico City, The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, The Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Scotland, The Green Room in Manchester, England, and Literatur Werkstat in Berlin. She also headlined the New Work Now Festival at Joe’s Pub/Public Theater in 2005. In 2018 she was a presenter at the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Awards. [5] [6] In 2024 she directed and starred in a performance in tribute to Big Mama Thornton at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater in New York City, for which she received a Creative Capital grant. [7] [8]
Sneed was also involved in Dyke TV, a nationally broadcast grassroots lesbian television program, from its inception in 1993. [9] She appeared weekly on the show as the presenter for the arts segment until 1996. [9]
In 2016, Sneed appeared in the live visuals for musician Anohni's song "Execution" on the HOPELESSNESS World Tour.
An out lesbian, [10] Sneed taught voice, performance, and autobiographical writing at Long Island University. In 2012-2014 she taught writing for solo performance and solo performance at Sarah Lawrence College. [11] [12] She was the 2017 visiting critic at Yale and at Columbia University, and has been an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts. [13] As of 2023, [update] Sneed is an online lecturer in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's low-residency Master of Fine Arts program. [14]
Sneed has mentored other writers, including a pairing with poet Tommy Pico in the 2011-2012 inaugural year of the Queer/Art/Mentors program founded by the filmmaker Ira Sachs. [15] [16] She has subsequently mentored Heather Lynn Johnson (2016-2017) and Erica Cardwell in the 2020-2021 cycle. [17]
Sneed's memoir, Funeral Diva, a poetry and prose book was published by City Lights Publishers in 2020. The book documents growing up in the midst of the AIDS crisis, and focuses specifically on the experiences of Black queer women. [18] [19] [20]
The book won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. [3]
Lambda Literary Awards, also known as the "Lammys", are awarded yearly by Lambda Literary to recognize the crucial role LGBTQ+ writers play in shaping the world. The Lammys celebrate the very best in LGBTQ+ literature. The awards were instituted in 1989.
Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." The Boston Globe described them as "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry." In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow, which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. Myles uses they/them pronouns.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Canadian-American poet, writer, educator and social activist. Their writing and performance art focuses on documenting the stories of queer and trans people of color, abuse survivors, mixed-race people and diasporic South Asians and Sri Lankans. A central concern of their work is the interconnection of systems of colonialism, abuse and violence. They are also a writer and organizer within the disability justice movement.
Michelle Tea is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, sex work, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and has identified with the San Francisco, California literary and arts community for many years. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their exposition of the queercore community.
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.
Michael Lassell is an American writer, editor and poet, who is best known for his contributions to the fields of design, travel, arts, Broadway theater, and LGBT studies.
Kiss and Tell is a Vancouver, British Columbia based performance and artist collective whose work is concerned with lesbian sexuality. In 1990, collective members Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones and Susan Stewart used the intense debates within the queer community around sexual practice in the early 1990s to create the photographic exhibition Drawing the Line. Their photographs depicted a continuum of lesbian sexual practice ranging from kissing to whipping, bondage, and voyeurism. The project encouraged gallery viewers to comment on what they saw and how it made them feel by writing directly on the walls around the prints; allowing the viewer to "draw the line" and examine their ideas and beliefs about different sexual behaviors. "Drawing the Line" was made in response to the "porn wars" of the late 80's-the feminist debate of if female sexual imagery was more oppressive to women, or if it was empowering to women. Kiss and Tell's work explicitly embraced depictions of female sexuality, and encouraged the conversation between anti-porn feminists and sex positive feminists. The art was controversial, even more so as it was released in the era of the Red Hot Video Store bombings. The collective displayed their work to point out the double standard in which artists exploring politics and sexuality are "cause for alarm" and yet adult films and magazines that are much more explicit are of no concern. This show was about desensitizing the view of queer sex and relationships. It intended to make lesbian relationships just as visible as straight relationships. Through the intimate exploration of queer bodies, The Kiss and Tell collective gave space for lesbians to perform and share their experiences. The show traveled widely in Canada and the United States in the 1990s, as well as showing in Australia and the Netherlands. In the summer of 2015 Kiss and Tell had redisplayed and revisited their exhibition "Drawing the Line." This was featured at the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival in celebration of the work's 25th anniversary, and was the first time in 13 years that it had been displayed.
Terry Wolverton is an American novelist, memoirist, poet, and editor. Her book Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman's Building, a memoir published in 2002 by City Lights Books, was named one of the "Best Books of 2002" by the Los Angeles Times, and was the winner of the 2003 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her novel-in-poems Embers was a finalist for the PEN USA Litfest Poetry Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Samiya A. Bashir is a queer American artist, poet, and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently the June Jordan visiting professor at Columbia University of New York. Bashir is the first black woman recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature. She was also the third black woman to serve as tenured professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Sharon Bridgforth is an American writer working in theater.
Amber Dawn is a Canadian writer, who won the 2012 Dayne Ogilvie Prize, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to an emerging lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender writer.
Yosimar Reyes is a Mexican-born poet and activist. He is a queer undocumented immigrant who was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and raised in East San Jose, California. Reyes has been described as "a voice that shines light on the issues affecting queer immigrants in the U.S. and throughout the world."
JD Scott is a Brooklyn, New York and Tampa, Florida based poet and writer. They are the winner of the 2018 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize, which produced the story collection Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day. The collection has been positively covered by multiple literary periodicals including Tor.com, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and Lambda Literary. They are also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Night Errands and FUNERALS & THRONES, published with Birds of Lace. Their debut full length poetry collection, Mask for Mask, was released from New Rivers Press in 2021 and was described by Publishers Weekly as a "startling", "memorable and energetic debut." Their writing has been anthologized in BAX 2015: Best American Experimental Writing and Best New Poets 2017. Scott's writing has been described as full of "something ominous, wolf-like lurking" and "unsurpassable in its #sorrynotsorry earnestness".
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.
Justin Chin (1969–2015) was a Malaysian-American poet, essayist and performer. In his work he often dealt with queer Asian-American identity and interrogated this category's personal and political circumstances.
Ana-Maurine Lara is a Dominican American lesbian poet, novelist and Black feminist scholar.
Maureen Therese Seaton was an American lesbian poet, memoirist, and professor of creative writing. She authored fifteen solo books of poetry, co-authored an additional thirteen, and wrote one memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, which won the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography. Seaton's writing has been described as "unusual, compressed, and surrealistic," and was frequently created in collaboration with fellow poets such as Denise Duhamel, Samuel Ace, Neil de la Flor, David Trinidad, Kristine Snodgrass, cin salach, Niki Nolin, and Mia Leonin.
Rosamond S. King is an American poet and literary theorist. She is a literature professor at Brooklyn College, where her courses focus on Caribbean and African literature, sexuality, and performance. In 2017, she won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry for her debut poetry collection, Rock | Salt | Stone.
Nancy Agabian is an American writer, activist, and teacher, currently lecturing at New York University, Gallatin. She is of Armenian origin, and her memoir about her childhood, Me as Her Again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter, won Lambda Literary's Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction.
Pamela Sneed, a performance poet, tops a man's leather bomber jacket, hip-tied sweater, pants and work boots with an overgrown newsboy cap.
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