Author: Wo Chan | Paperback
Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.
About Wo Chan:
Wo Chan who performs as The Illustrious Pearl is a poet and drag artist. Winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, Wo is the author of Togetherness (2022), which was a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award, and the winner of the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, The Asian American Writers Workshop, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N' Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.
Author: Wo Chan | Paperback
Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.
About Wo Chan:
Wo Chan who performs as The Illustrious Pearl is a poet and drag artist. Winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, Wo is the author of Togetherness (2022), which was a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award, and the winner of the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, The Asian American Writers Workshop, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N' Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.
Questions?
