Now available for purchase! Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices, Edited by Helen Klonaris and Amir Rabiyah.
Writing the Walls Down explores the physical and metaphorical significance of walls in our external landscapes as well as in our internal emotional and imaginal landscapes. We’re asking writers what stories do city walls, border walls, and prison walls have to tell us? What stories are stuck inside bedroom walls, kitchen walls, and the walls that separate neighbors from each other? How do these walls mirror the ones we learned to build inside our own bodies? And what have been the consequences?
Featuring poetry, fiction, essays and visual art by: Indira Allegra, Fabian Romero, Eli Clare, Danez Smith, Trish Salah, Rajiv Mohabir, Aiyyana Maracle, Vickie Vértiz, Kay Ulanday Barrett and more.
The texts included in this fierce, beautiful weave of LGBTQ texts (groundbreaking in many ways, including in the rich inclusion of Arab and Indigenous contributors) speak, shout, and sing past the different kinds of walls that imprison, exclude, and alienate, whether personal, societal, economic, religious, geographical, or political. Challenging barricades ranging from class to homophobia to anti-queer violence to Israel’s apartheid wall to the US-Mexico exclusionary border, these writers celebrate bodies and spirits both broken and sacred, reclaim healing and wholeness, and map the way toward new definitions of home.
-Lisa Suhair Majaj, author of Geographies of Light
This collection of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and visual art crackles with urgency, emotion and intelligence. It bursts forth from the pressurized isolation created by assumptions and ignorance, ushering into the world transformative stories that are vital to our survival.
-Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories
Bravo, Amir Rabiyah and Helen Klonaris, for curating such an extraordinary community in the pages of Writing the Walls Down. What rises up is a chorus of poetry, story, and testimony that substantiates our varied queer experiences. Anyone who enters here will not feel isolated or alone because this book is an invitation into the heart of the powerful, life-saving word--a crucial place where many of us find our kindred spirit, our blessed haven, our tribe, our home.
-Rigoberto González, author of Unpeopled Eden
Co-Editor, Amir Rabiyah in Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices, September 2015
