Anthology Bundle Announcement
Nary: (takes a deep breath) Look. I have hope because I live here. What choice do I have? Even surrounded by these fools, I know there are enough non-fools out here that we can make a difference. The next few years are going to be real hard. The bad guys are going to win some battles. They’ll take more and more power and try to squeeze more and more people out of the future they want. And the scary thing is that it isn’t just the corrupt leaders and Bosses. There’s an authoritarianism that lives inside a whole lot of us, even the decent folk. When we care more about punishing crimes than preventing them. When we care more about our “team” winning than whether or not people are suffering. When we care more about following the rules than thinking critically about what the rules are in the first place. We’ve got to fight it in ourselves, too. And artists can have a meaningful role in that work. Sometimes that work is in our art; like, sure, writing about what people face today matters. Writing about what tomorrow might look like matters. And sometimes it’s less about the art and more about the space we take up in society, the audiences we have access to, the literal places we move through. But either way, we have to face the situation. We have to engage with reality. I’ll wrap it up with this: if someone hates someone else or cares more about their material possessions than other people’s lives, I don’t think I can write a poem that will change their mind. But “changing minds” isn’t the only thing artists can do. We can be mobilizers. We can be movement-builders. We can use our network to spread information. We can preach to the choir, and that choir can knock a wall down. The choir can sing so loud they knock all the walls down. It’s a cool metaphor . . . but it is a metaphor. Songs can’t actually knock walls down, no matter how loud they are. But singers can. –Kyle Tran Myre, “The Role of Artists in Times of Authoritarian Brutality: A Panel Discussion,” Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough
Baki’s Anthology Bundle
I have included this excerpt from Guante as a way of introducing what I believe the purpose of Baki’s collaboration with Queermunity has been these past several months. Baki, a native Minnesotan BIPOC artist and influencer, has been leading workshops for years now teaching folks the craft of Zine-making. For those of you who do not know what a Zine is, it is a self-produced magazine of appropriated art or text often written with radical goals in mind. I have put out a few of these now under Baki’s tutelage, making impressions of my own poetry for the text, complemented by visual storytelling as ripped from magazines like National Geographic.
Two of my pieces made it into the Anthology Bundle that was made possible through Baki’s 2025 Zine Series in Collaboration with Queermunity. This year, their Cultural Districts Arts Fund program was funded by the Arts & Cultural Affairs Department in the City of Minneapolis. It is my greatest hope that they continue to secure funding in the future.