Kay Ulanday Barrett

Barrett's writing and performance centers on the experience of queer, transgender, people of color, mixed race people, Asian, and Filipino/a/x community. The focus of their artistic work navigates multiple systems of oppression in the context of the United States.

• Birthplace — Mackinaw City, Michigan, U.S. • Education — DePaul University • Website — kaybarrett.net

Ulanday Barrett was born in Mackinaw City, Michigan and grew up in a low-income and working class household. Their father was a merchant marine and their mother was a Filipina migrant domestic worker. Barrett began writing and poetry as a task to help their mother during her shifts cleaning motel rooms and other people's homes. After their parents' divorce, Barrett moved with their mother to Chicago, where they lived in the Albany Park and Logan Square neighborhoods. Barrett attended Lane Tech High School. They attended undergraduate studies at DePaul University and studied Women's & Gender Studies along with Political Science with a minor in English. Barrett's early work is informed by the 1990s spoken word, community theater, hip-hop, and slam poetry movements that arose in Chicago among marginalized communities of that time. They frequented open-mics, poetry slams, and community theatre spaces as well as organized in POC and migrant solidarity networks as a means to create queer and people of color community.

Barrett has been performing poetry, spoken word, and interdisciplinary theatre professionally since 2004. Their artistic influences were through touring, teaching, and collaborative work with Mango Tribe, Women Outloud!, Young Chicago Authors, The Chicago Freedom School, and Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School. Trained by community poets and theater artists, much of their work was centered in the practices of Theatre of The Oppressed and Popular Education as shown by ensemble residencies he attended by theHemispheric Institute, namely New World Theater and Asian Arts Initiative. Recent writing and poetry have centered on the praxis of disability justice, specifically elaborating on intersectionality of multiple communities including transgender people of color and the chronically ill and disabled community.

In 2020, Barrett said of their poetry, "There are elements of traditional form in my poetry but then there’s also super contemporary modern form — list poems, blues poems, and then I’ll use a pantoum”. In the 2014 anthology Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, Barrett's work is described as “alternatively admonishing, encouraging, and elevating the queer and trans communities". Barrett is the author of two poetry collections: When The Chant Comes (published 2016) and More Than Organs (published 2020 by Sibling Rivalry Press). The latter was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist and an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award Honor Book.

* * *

* * * * * * *

They have received fellowships & residencies from Millay Arts (2023), Tin House (2022), MacDowell (2020), Lambda Literary (2017, 2018), VONA Voices (2018), and Macondo (2018). In 2018 they were guest faculty at the Poetry Foundation. They have featured and given keynotes at venues such as The United Nations, The Whitney, The Museum of Modern Art, The Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Museum, Hemispheric Institute, Queens Museum, and the Chicago Historical Society.

Barrett is mixed race and of Filipino descent. They are queer, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming trans non-binary, and have used the pronouns they, he, k, ne, and pogi (a Tagalog term). They have undergone elective top surgery and an emergency hysterectomy. Barrett is disabled and experiences chronic pain, which influences their work. As of 2020, Barrett is based in New York City.