Liminal Bodies is a Pacific Northwest-based queer and trans, Asian and Pacific Islander writing project focusing on movement as a process for deepening our writing practices. Liminal Bodies offers space for QTAPI and fellow QT/BIPOC to build community, read, write, and play together through various events, workshops, and retreats throughout the year. 

Follow them on IG @liminal_bodies 

Kelly Novahom (she/her) is a queer Pilipino and Mexican American multidisciplinary artist, educator, community organizer, event producer, cultural worker, and co-founder of the Queer & Trans, Asian & Pacific Islander writing and movement project, Liminal Bodies. She is currently a student of prose, in the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) Portfolio Program and a Program Manager at Center for Community Engagement at Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling where her work strives to bring social justice-focused continuing education opportunities to writers, educators, and counselors.

In the past, she has served as the Education & Community Programs Director for Shaking the Tree Theatre, organizing events on fight choreography, movement, and intimacy direction. Other works include co-producing Coming Out & Overcoming with Theatre Diaspora and Artist Repertory Theatre, a storytelling project that seeks to provide connection and opportunity to center narratives around what it means to fully live in multiple identities as queer and trans, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), and guest curating and co-producing events such as the APANO Annual East Portland Arts & Literary Festival and the Portland launch event for the Pilipinx Radical Imagination Reader with Whitenoise Project.

Lilly Do (she/her) is a queer Chinese American facilitator and instructor. Lilly is the Program and Administrative Coordinator at Write Around Portland and works to build the BIPOC writing community through Resonate: A BIPOC Writing Circle, a free writing program that consists of participants writing, sharing, and giving strength-based feedback. When she isn’t facilitating writing workshops, Lilly spends her time engaging in the BIPOC, AAPI, and queer and trans communities in Portland and is a member of the APANO’s Art & Media Project.

Eric Tran (he/him) is a queer Vietnamese poet and the author of Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke, winner of the Oregon Book Award and a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award, and The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer. His poetry has been featured in All Things Considered, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily, and has received recognition from Best of the Net, Prairie Schooner, and New Delta Review, among other publications. He is a psychiatrist in Portland, OR.

nawa a.h., known as Moonyeka (they/them) is a chimeric creator who takes shape in and beyond containers of interdisciplinary performing art, writing, and brujxeria. 

With a specialty in offering sensually sacred dance and movement-based storytelling experiences, Moonyeka's performance, community organizing, and divination work centers kapwa, maarte, and kilig as a compass to imagine worlds where their communities can thrive. 

They’re currently developing an upcoming work, Harana For The Aswang, an audio-visual-performance work centered on the research of harana, a Filipinx serenade song form rooted in courtship and grief rituals.

nawa draws upon queer and trans performance technologies in their writing, infusing nightlife, states of icon-myth-legend, the erotic, drag, tease, and kink. You can find them frolicking in a spectrum of writing fields and genres such as biomythography, hybrid-WTFness, and the game writing industry.  Within their literary embodiment, they’ve appeared in Novice Philippines Magazine and were recently published with their multiverse of work centering Waling-Waling Orchids in smoke and mold. Their work, am i hot enough to kill?, an excerpt of (w)horrific hybrid prose, is featured in The Holy Hour anthology by Working Girls Press. 

They have the honor of being the Artistic Director of The House of Kilig and a founding space tender of Paruparo - a QTPOC haven in Portland, OR.

Louisiana-born Jae Nichelle (she/her) is the author of the poetry collection God Themselves and the chapbook The Porch (As Sanctuary). Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2020, the Washington Square Review, The Offing, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere.  She believes in all of our collective ability to contribute to radical change.

Oliver Binzen (he/him) is a writer and multi-disciplinary artist from the Northeast. His work explores internet psychology, systems of community, and alternatives to a human perspective.