by Geoff Kagan Trenchard
3 fulltime public school employees whose job it could be
to help advocate for gay kids
who get called faggot everyday. 6 part time employees
who could at least run
an after-school program where kids could talk about what it’s like
to be called a faggot everyday. 500 day visits from teaching artists
who could facilitate workshops on what happens when it’s permissible
to call kids faggots everyday. 5000 bouquets of flowers for families
whose children killed themselves because they attended a school
where they were called faggot everyday.
Geoff Kagan Trenchard’s poems have been published in numerous journals including Word Riot, The Nervous Breakdown, The Worcester Review, SOFTBLOW and November 3rd. He has received endowments from the National Performance Network, Dance Theater Workshop, The Zellerbach Family Foundation and the City of Oakland to produce original theatrical work. As a mentor for Urban Word NYC, he taught weekly poetry workshops in the foster care center at Bellevue as well as in Rikers Island with Columbia University’s “Youth Voices on Lockdown” program. He is a recipient of a fellowship from the Riggio Writing and Democracy program at the New School and the first ever louderARTS Writing Fellowship. He has performed poetry on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, at universities throughout the United States, and in theaters internationally as a member of the performance poetry troupe “The Suicide Kings”. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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