If the Color Is Fugitive

2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist for Transgender Poetry. At the close of the frontier, during a queer elsewhen, IF THE COLOR IS FUGITIVE asks for witness to vagrants searching for landmarks amidst rubble. Peppered with invented idioms and slant colloquialisms, these poems preserve an archive of survival that reads like a folklorist translating from local dialect to earnest exhortation: how to escape with nothing but your name.

Poetry. Women's Studies. California Interest.

Julian née Sara Mithra hovers between genre and gender, border mongering and mongreling. At local festivals, they exhibit handmade chapbooks and cut-up zines, like Mixt Frame (2017), WOOD: A Handbook (2015), and The Better to Teeth You With (2013). Read their words on paper in Versal 12, Milvia Street, Storm Cellar, ANXY, The Other Side of Violet, and on a screen at pnkprl, Gendertrash Café, and PoetryFilmKanal. They received the Prospero Prize from Fathom Books in 2017. For a Masters in Folklore Studies at UC Berkeley, Sara dressed up as a 19th-century anthropologist and spoke through a copper pipe. Find unsettling recitations on Soundcloud and watch soft-focus, collage-poem videos on Vimeo.