In these pages, students of the Queer Ancestors Project respond to their ancestors through original writing and art. Sylvia Rivera compels us to stay and fight, speaking to poets “becoming trans femme.” Friends fallen to suicide, “mute ash,” and Guan Yin offer queer elegies, poems to transform trauma. Serpent women, genderqueer mermaids, and glitter crusted love found in the sea, sky, and clubs queerly remind us of our community’s defiance, beauty, survival, and creativity. Declarations of self-love combat silence, and the real life struggles of poverty, isolation, migration, homo/transphobia. Arranged in conversation, Tender forms a stirring collective. We must never forget, as student Jose Francisco says in “Rise”: “we hold the power to shape the future, and, together, to shake these walls down.” 

Vianney Casas’s debut poetry chapbook Girasol ushers readers into a sensuous, menacing landscape where physical, emotional, and spiritual boundaries dissolve and reform in unexpected, profound ways. With minimal punctuation, shifts in tense, and deft weaving of English and Spanish, Girasol has a dream-like quality, suspending the reader inside a trauma that’s simultaneously in the past and ever-present.