Desire Notes: Reading & Salon
Join us for the 3rd iteration of the Queens Reading Series — Desire Notes. As philosopher Lauren Berlant writes, our desires are also a way of choosing our identities". Taking inspiration from Anne Carson, Lauren Berlant, and Amia Srinivasan, this event curates conversation between four writers who have written on desire and its transformative properties.
Suggested donation is $10-$20 and all proceeds will go towards Community Aid Network MN / immigration legal help. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Please venmo @jakets. All who donate will also be sent a reading list on desire (taken mostly from my thesis project LOL) with some annotations along with excerpts from our readers.
The readers are:
Stine An (@gregorspamsa) is a poet, translator, and performer in NYC whose work explores diasporic poetics, experimental translation, and virtual performance. Her poems and translations appear in Best Literary Translations, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Words Without Borders, and more. A 2024 NEA Translation Fellow, Stine is the author of S_MMER CR_SH (Sarabande Books, 2025) and the translator of Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press, 2025). Their debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite, a winner of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize, is forthcoming in Fall 2026 from Nightboat Books.
Christina McCausland is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Majuscule, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast, and The Cut, among other publications.
Jasmin Sandelson is the author of My Girls: The Power of Friendship in a Poor Neighborhood (University of California Press, 2023). Her essays appear in The Sewanee Review, The Rumpus, The Georgia Review, Longreads, and Hobart. Jasmin has a Ph.D. in sociology and an MFA in creative nonfiction, and her work has been supported by the Axinn Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Mia Arias Tsang is a writer based in New York City. Her work explores themes of queer desire, intimacy, and disconnect. Her first collection, FRAGMENTS OF WASTED DEVOTION, is out now with Quilted Press. She lives in Queens with her cat, Peanut, and is working on a novel.
Afterparty will be at JIA BAR (sponsored by FEELD).
Address: 71-22 Roosevelt Ave, Jackson Heights, NY 11372
Come for drinks, convo, and maybe karaoke.