PennSound podcasts
Trish Salah with Christy Davids
PennSound podcast #57
Christy Davids and Trish Salah visited Kelly Writers House on February 10, 2017, for a reading and conversation. Salah was in Philadelphia for a sequence of events to share her poetry and scholarship: a talk on trans literature at Penn, a workshop with young trans and gender nonconforming writers at the Kelly Writers House, and a reading at the Housework reading series at Chapterhouse in Center City. Davids and Salah talked about lyric form, origin stories, and the “problems of the self” before Salah read passages from Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1, and Wanting in Arabic. Shortly after this reading, Salah presented research from her current research project, Towards a Trans Minor Literature, an inquiry into the aesthetic and political projects of trans, transsexual, genderqueer, and two-spirit writers.
Trish Salah works in the area of transnational studies in gender, sexuality, race, and minority cultural production. Born in Halifax, she is the author of the Lambda Award-winning Wanting in Arabic, and of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. She is a member of the editorial boards of TSQ and Topia and the coeditor of a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on transgender cultural production. At the University of Winnipeg she organized the conferences “Writing Trans Genres: Emergent Literatures and Criticism” and “Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres.” Her writing is available in recent and forthcoming issues of Angelaki, The Capilano Review, Sinister Wisdom, and Vetch: A Magazine of Trans Poetry and Poetics. She is currently assistant professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University.
Christy Davids is an assistant editor at The Conversant. She cocurates the Philadelphia-based reading series Charmed Instruments, and collects recordings at poetry//SOUNDS. Some of her work can be found in VOLT, Open House, Boog City, Bedfellows, the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet, and elsewhere; her chapbook “on heat” is forthcoming from BOAAT Press. — Julia Bloch
