12 wishes for 2026

With her debut chapbook, award-winning author and curator Legacy Russell returns to poetry with her GAY POMPEII, a collection of lyric poems that begin at the end of the world.

Rising out of Russell's 2022-2023 Digital Fellowship for Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters, the first long-term, contemporary art programme established by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, the author and curator explores ash, filth, dirt, and decay, intersectional with the fetishistic mythos of Pompeii and its destruction in 79 CE by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that receives over two million visitors per year to view its archeological excavation. Russell puts the mass voyeurism, sensation, extraction, and loss of Pompeii—a devastating moment frozen in time—to work. In GAY POMPEII, the site becomes a device with which Russell unspools birth, death, genocide, visual culture, and space-time. The title of this compilation underscores the essence and demand of capitalism: to be carefree in the face of looming extinction. Russell's GAY POMPEII is a selfie taken at the edge of catastrophe and a polyphonic elegy.

Legacy Russell (born 1986 in New York City) is a curator and writer. She is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of the experimental arts institution The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell's written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally.

Transchool: Volume 2 is an anthology featuring the multifaceted work — poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, genre-defying writing — by the second class of Transchool creative writers and their mentors, including Amos Mac, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Sylan Oswald, and torrin a. greathouse, with introduction letters from Chase Strangio and Kyle Lasky of @Transanta, Drew Denny, and Ren Heintz. Allies in Arts founded Transchool to empower the voices of trans and nonbinary writers ages 18-25. This volume of the Transchool anthology includes work that was created by these writers in June, 2024.

“These are the crevices that these writers have found and put to words while much of the world tries to turn us into a soundbite cliché, an emulsified reduction of what cannot be contained. There is a glow to each of these writers, and to the worlds they are bringing us towards.” – Dr. Ren Heintz

Contributors:
Chase Strangio
Kyle Lasky
Ren Heintz
Park Walters
J. Martel
Cassandra R. Flowers
Jo(rdan) Snow
Cameron Awkward-Rich
E.F. Tate
KB
Amos Mac
CL
R. David
Shea S. Davis
Sal Kang
torrin a. greathouse
Elijah Bendiner
Sylvan Oswald
Quinlan Owens
D. Ezra
Shoshana Katz
Dominic Emerson Wing

What happens when you peak in high school, or maybe earlier, or maybe not at all? When you hate your friends, or love them too much? When the warmth of nostalgia starts to slowly poison you? In Girl on Girl, Emily Costa explores desperation and loneliness, screen obsession, and casual cruelty as characters—mostly women and girls—struggle to be seen.

sex and place is a series of workshops and publications exploring score-based and semi-anonymous writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns.

Vol. 1 ‘preliminiaries’ is written by Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen. In the midst of (learning) child care, (unlearning) performance and (experimenting with) sex, the publication interweaves three registers of writing as analogies and interruptions of each other.

The ‘sex and place’ series is part Domestic Anarchism, a project devoted to coalition-building beyond biological, chosen, or national conceptions of family. Dance serves as a set of tools and knowledge that can be applied beyond “the spectacle” to collectively study, write, and move. 

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three-year-old Penélope Cleo. Andrea and Adriano use dance and choreography to think about the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’, and in turn consider how such a distribution could inform their dance practice. Inevitably themes like sex, economy, gender, and class get activated. But also notions such as prefiguration, anarchism, clitoridian* thinking, zones of non-domination and coalition building. They see dance as a knowledge that can be applied to different practices. Some of these include: co-habitations, score based writing and dancing, self-organised study groups and publications, workshops and dance performances. 

CONSTANT VIOLINS is a hybrid book consisting of two parts, each comprised of two texts of sci-fi auto-fiction: ‘FӔTAL ATRACTUS’ & ‘COQUETTES’, ‘RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR’ & ‘SOPH MOB’.  CONSTANT VIOLINS follows mutating characters & contexts that grapple & contort in half-step with the logics of a vast labyrinth of psycho para-social references, playing out across a tête-bêche (or head-to-tail) format book. The myriad ‘worlds’ occupied & embodied narratively riff on the act of world-making in itself. 

As an only child, I used to climb up onto my grandmother’s vanity & collapse the 3 way mirror over my head so I could bask in the calm of the many me’s preening inside its reflective continuum. Sometimes I would just lean against the looking glass above her bureau or pretend the wall was my simultaneous lover. No one wants to be alone. Under covers, I initiate the same sequences of experiments that virtually anyone does. 

We all imagine what our pillows witness annually would baffle sane onlookers. That’s why we practice kissing on our dorsal carpal arches, peaches in the dead of night, or remove condoms from bananas with our teeth. CONSTANT VIOLINS wants what any book wants; to become a formidable power couple with its author like a Pokemon & its precocious Trainer.

Jordan/Martin Hell (b. 1993, USA) is a Black trans(2s) writer, artist, & scholar who attended Städelschule (DE) & Cooper Union School of Art. He is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary’s University of London. Hell’s work is interdisciplinary & interlaced with his writing as the seedbed for his various explorations across painting, sculpture, pedagogy, music, dance, etc. In all of his work Hell is invested in the embedded associations which proliferate in the global collective subconscious & how that frames intimate (& often violent) realities in the lives of individuals whether historical, celebrity, or obscure. Closely linked with his work is a spiritualist psychoanalytic practice which spans hypnosis, theology, philosophy, Black fugitivity, & indigenous somatics.