Nat Raha + Willa Smart

Anastasio Wrobel, “We Are Alive & We Want to Live” - May 2024, approx 36” x 48” - charcoal, acrylic, spray paint, oil bar and gesso on canvas

Reading

Small Press Traffic will host poet and activist-scholar Nat Raha, who is visiting from Edinburgh, Scotland, with Bay Area poet Willa Smart. The authors will present readings of recent work before joining in conversation about trans writing and life.

What actions / poetics / dialogues do we need for this phase of global backlash against trans and gender non-conforming people? Poetic offerings will inspire a discussion encompassing trans care, abolitionist ethics, politics of fantasy, trans femme futures, and more.

WHEN

Saturday, April 5th | Doors at 6:30 PM, Event at 7:00 PM

Saturday, April 5, 2025

6:30 pm

WHERE

Et al.
2831a Mission St, SF

NOTES ON ACCESsIBILITY

Et al.'s exhibition spaces are on the ground floor; the entrance and bathrooms are wheelchair-accessible.

No items found.

Dr. Nat Raha

Dr. Nat Raha is a poet, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her poetry is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Her performance work, epistolary (on carceral islands) was co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023.

With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024), and ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’, published in Social Text.

‍

Willa Smart

Willa Smart was born in Idaho and is the author of numerous fantasies, insofar as one can claim to be the author of her own fantasies.