BIPOC Reading Series March

Jessica Meza-Torres

Kelly Novahom (she/her) is a queer Pilipino and Mexican American multidisciplinary artist, educator, community organizer, event producer, cultural worker, and a cofounder of the Queer & Trans Asian & Pacific Islander writing and movement project, Liminal Bodies. She is currently a student of prose, in the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) Portfolio Program and a Program Manager at Center for Community Engagement at Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling where her work strives to bring social justice focused continuing education opportunities to writers, educators, and counselors.In the past, she has served as the Education & Community Programs Director for Shaking the Tree Theatre, organizing events on fight choreography, movement and intimacy direction. Other works include co-producing Coming Out & Overcoming with Theatre Diaspora and Artist Repertory Theatre, a storytelling project that seeks to provide connection and opportunity to center narratives around what it means to fully live in multiple identities as queer and trans Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), and guest curating and co-producing events such as the APANO Annual East Portland Arts & Literary Festival and the Portland launch event for the Pilipinx Radical Imagination Reader with Whitenoise Project.

Ami Patel (she/her) is a queer, diasporic South Asian poet and young adult fiction writer. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Tin House YA Fiction alum, and an IPRC 2023-2024 re/source resident. Ami’s poetry is published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Moss, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets, and others. She is a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient.