PASSAGE & PLACE is a multimedia visual arts exhibition, book project, and skillshare series that explores displacement & movement, freedom & incarceration, and home & im/migration at the intersection of queerness.

For the PASSAGE & PLACE print project we have compiled a collection of written and visual artwork from queer and trans folx both inside and outside of prison, that consider and complicate the topic of "Home". Some contributers include Virgie Tovar (author of Hot & Heavy), Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (author of Consentual Genocide, editor of The Revolution Starts at Home), Heidi Andrea Rhodes (co-founder & editor of Reveries & Rage), Veronica Stein (Fabulous Brown Works), Jacks McNamara (author of Inbetweenland, co-founder of The Icarus Project), Banah Ghadbian (Feminist Wire), and more!

As part of reaching beyond walls, we partnered with the TGI (Transgender | Gender Variant | Intersex) Justice Project/TGIJP and Black & Pink to send the Passage & Place call for submissions to currently incarcerated LGBTQ prisoners. We received over 100 letters, poems, and artwork!

A collection of these letters and images will be bound and printed into an anthology released in conjunction with the Passage & Place exhibition at the National Queer Arts Festival, 2014. All participants from the inside will receive a free copy of the finished book.

Your donations will support us in sending this book to the printers! Your donations will help us cover mailing costs so that contributors who are currently locked up can receive copies of the finished publication!

Our anticipated mailing costs for sending free copies to incarcerated contributors is $400 alone. Help us remind our queer family behind bars that their voices are still loud, fierce, and being heard!

$ M O N E Y $

It probably won't come as a surprise that funding for the arts is really, really limited -- and especially hard to come by for projects rooted in queer narratives and foregrounded by the voices of incarcerated queer and trans folks. The Passage & Place exhibition at the National Queer Arts Festival is funded in part by the Queer Cultural Center, and the book, as an axillary project, depends on support from Y O U.

Transparency notes: Our goal for this campaign is $1200, but we actually need more than that! We set the goal low to guarantee that we hit it and to minimize the fees taken off the top. The actual cost breakdown is approximately $1200 to print, $400 to mail copies into prisons, and an additional $100 to mail to contributors on the outside. We're volunteering the time we spend organizing, curating, publicizing, transcribing, and designing the book! If, through your amazing support, we raise more than our printing/mailing costs, the extra money will be donated to the TGI Justice Project -- to support their work of providing legal support and empowering a membership base that is largely trans women of color -- and Black & Pink -- to support their work advocating for, supporting, acting as a hub for penpals & information, and connecting "free world" allies to LGBTQ prisoners.

▼ P E R K S ▼

▼ MORE WAYS TO HELP ▼

Curators/Editors:

Lex Non Scripta is a 34 year old, working-class, trans/genderqueer/dandy multi-media artist, curator, and activist from the shores of the San Francisco Bay. Having lived in over 34 different homes throughout the U.S. over the course of their life, they are interested in exploring the ways that transience and displacement inform how we navigate the world, and how we build, sustain and invest in community. lexnonscripta.com & wildfancydesign.etsy.com

Annah Anti-Palindrome is a 32 year old queer/femme who was raised in the rural, working-class craters at the base of the sierra foothills. She is interested in exploring the ways that her home of origin constructed her early sense of self, as well as the ways that separation from that home (via juvenile detention centers, addiction, rehabilitation clinics, travel and relocation) have displaced her from that original sense of self over time. She is interested in exploring the ways we are often required to reclaim and redefine ourselves as we move (by force or choice) further away from what we once knew home to be. annahantipalindrome.com