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.[1][2] Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) 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.
They have received fellowships from MacDowell (2020), Lambda Literary (2017, 2018), VONA Voices (2018), and Macondo (2018). In 2018 they were Guest Faculty at the Poetry Foundation. They have featured and given keynotes at venues such as The U.N., Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Museum, Hemispheric Institute, and the Chicago Historical Society. They also have served on committees, organizations, and collectives in attempts to serve communities that desire self-determination such as Trans Justice Funding Project, Transgender Law Center, Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and more.
Their work and thoughts have been published in media such as Vogue Magazine, them.us, ColorLines,Bitch, POOR Magazine, Curve magazine, Al Jazeera English, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, Frontier Poetry, The Advocate, The Huffington Post, and PBS News Hour.[3] Their first poetry collection, When The Chant Comes was published by Topside Press in 2016. Their second book, More Than Organs was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in the March 2020.
Early life and education
Ulanday Barrett was born in Mackinaw City, and grew up in a low-income and working class household, their father a merchant marine and mother a migrant domestic worker. Barrett identifies as Mixed Race - Filipinx and white american. Barrett began writing and poetry as a task to help their mother during her shifts cleaning motel rooms and other people's homes. After their parents' divorce, Barrett moved with their mother to Chicago, Il., where they lived in the Albany Park and Logan Square neighborhoods. Kay then attended undergraduate studies at DePaul University and studied Women's & Gender Studies along with Political Science with a minor in English. Barrett's early work is informed by the '90s spoken word, community theater, hip-hop, and slam poetry movements that arose in Chicago among marginalized communities of that time. They frequented open-mics, poetry slams, and community theatre spaces as well as organized in POC and migrant solidarity networks as a means to create queer and people of color community that they desperately longed for.
Performance and speaking work
Barrett has been performing poetry, spoken word, and interdisciplinary theatre professionally since 2004. Their artistic influences were on touring, teaching, and collaborative work with Mango Tribe, Women Outloud!, Young Chicago Authors, The Chicago Freedom School, and Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School. Trained by community poets and theater artists, much of their work was centered in the practices of Theatre of The Oppressed and Popular Education as shown by ensemble residencies he attended by theHemispheric Institute, namely New World Theater and Asian Arts Initiative. Recent writing and poetry have centered on the praxis of disability justice,[4] specifically elaborating on intersectionality of multiple communities including transgender people of color and the chronically ill and disabled community.
Dedicated to community-driven cultural and movement building work, they have served on committees, led workshops, and featured with many organizations dedicated to the self-determination of Transgender, People of Color, and Queer People of Color such as FIERCE, The Audre Lorde Project, The Transgender Law Project, The Philadelphia Transgender Health Project, Queers for Economic Justice, The Disability Justice Collective, Civil Liberties and Public Policy Conference (CLPP), The National Queer Asian Pacific-Islander Alliance, The Allied Media Conference, CultureStrike, and Northeast Queer Trans People of Color Conference (NEQTPOCC). They must recently were in an advisory committee for the Netflix documentary, Crip Camp.
Sharon Bridgforth, author of love conjure/blues and the Lambda Literary Award-winning the bull-jean stories, published by RedBone Press, reviewed Ulanday Barrett's work, stating: "I believe that Kay is an artist of merit. Kay is all heart. All in… We need Kay’s stories, Kay’s stellar art, Kay’s warrior vision."
Teaching
Barrett has been an educator teaching poetry, spoken word, theatre, slam poetry, and cultural work at various high schools and youth arts organizations nationwide. Their latest endeavors include workshops that center experiences of intersectionality, social justice, disability and chronic illness, and martial arts. Universities and organizations alike seek their work to address issues of marginalized identities and cultural work as movement building strategy.
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