Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry and a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship Award at MacDowell. 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 Finalist. They have received fellowships from VONA Voices, Monson Arts, Macondo, and The Lambda Literary Review. They have featured at The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, The Hemispheric Institute, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Museum, Dodge Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, The School of the Arts Institute, Manchester PRIDE, Sesame Street, & more. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, Colorlines, Asian American Literary Review, The Advocate, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, The Lily, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. Currently, they serve as a co-curator at The Asian American Writer’s Workshop.
Project Description: Kay will continue to work on their new poetry collection, Root Systems and also editing a collection of essays, Eat Good for Me. Through an array of forms, Root systems examines ancestral connection and disabled life as a trans brown person. Eat Good For Me explores a trans Filipinx in grief and growing up not to mention the recipes that keep them alive.
Residency: 2022 General