Coming to you live from the Spoken Word stage at Out and Wild, the UK’s biggest festival for lesbian, bi, trans and queer women and those who are non-binary! This conversation with the delightful Leilah King has everything you could hope for: laughing, rhyming, swooning, and a whole lot of poetry reading. Tune in to hear Leilah speak about gender nonconformity in football, her journey as a neurodivergent performance poet, and how being half-Iranian affects her experience as a queer woman.

CW: mental health, manic state, gendered violence  

References:
Midnight Picnics in Tehran (2019)
We Are Hungry for Androgyny (2023)
Polari Press
Mary Oliver
Sam Kerr
Audre Lorde’s Zami
Travis Alabanza
John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
The Grapes of Wrath
Charles Bukowski
Ivan Coyote’s The Tomboy Survival Guide
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
John Betjeman
Philip Larkin
Soft Butch
Time of the Month
Gay on Wye  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.      Leilah reflects on being a writer as well as a performer. How does performance affect her writing?
2.      What was Leilah’s open mic night called and why did she set it up?
3.      Who are some of the writers that have inspired Leilah? Who inspires you?
4.      Leilah speaks about her intersecting experiences of being queer, neurodivergent and half-Iranian. How does your queerness relate to other parts of your identity?