This year was bad! But good work happens during bad years too. As is tradition: a few highlights from 2024, for people who are interested in what I do but may have missed something here or there.
Target Center performance + Grammy (!?)
It’s a long story, but as you may know, I’m on two songs by producer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Fred Again. This year, I got to perform one of those songs, “Kyle (i found you),” with Fred during his MPLS tour stop at the Target Center. Absolutely surreal; that’s what the photo above is from. The other song, “Berwyn (all that I got is you),” is on Fred’s album “Actual Life 3,” which won the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Music Album back in February.
My friends try to tell me I should just go ahead and say that I’m “a Grammy-winning artist” since I’m a writer/performer on the album, but the humble midwesterner in me is going to run with “appears on a Grammy-winning album.” Either way, it’s kind of cool and not something I ever expected to happen.
New album: All Dressed Up, No Funeral
The first new Guante & Big Cats project in over five years: a climate crisis concept album about cultivating hope through grief and collective action. THANK YOU to everyone who listened, double thanks to everyone who shared it, and triple thanks to everyone who came out to our release show. A few links:
- Listen to the album on Spotify or Apple Music, and/or purchase it on Bandcamp.
- Here’s a deep dive into the album: notes on the process, shareable lyric squares, reviews & commentary, and more!
- We’re #3 on Racket’s list of the best local albums of 2024.
- Check out this in-studio performance of the opening track, and this medley of lyric videos animated by Medium Zach:
New Merch! Lyric/Art Print Bundle
I had a fantastic experience working with artists Destiny Davison and Natalie Hinahara on these prints. They’re available as a bundle via Button Poetry!
Poetry and Poetry-Adjacent Work
This may have been the first year in a long time where I didn’t release any new books or poetry videos, but poetry was still central to my day-to-day work. That includes writing (I hope to be able to share Ragdoll soon), but also a lot of poetry-related stuff:
- A few thoughts on what it means to mark national poetry month during a genocide. While that writing is focused on April, it really frames a lot of what was (and continues to be) on my mind all year.
- Related: I put together this playlist: A Handful of Poems as Doorways into Dialogue About Palestine that I hope can be useful. I definitely used a lot of these poems this year, whether by teaching them, or sharing them to open events, or using them as dialogue-starters.
- As for my own work: my poem, When It Really Is Just the Wind, and Not a Furious Vexation, was picked by Danez Smith to be the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” for August 6. Here is the original text/video, and here is the poets.org link.
- I’m continuing to work with SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE on our “Secret Rivers” project (spoken word over live MPC and Loop Station 505). Stay tuned…
- Finally, I did a lot of teaching and facilitating this year (in schools, online, and in various community spaces), but a special shout out to the Button Poetry class I taught: Of What Future Are These, the Wild, Early Days?, a class focused on both science fiction and the “anthemic” impulse. I mention that here because those are both themes I’ll be bringing back and running with in 2025. Let’s connect!
The Debut of My Mobile Zine Library + Two New Zines
I’ve been making and sharing zines for years; this year, I finally found a big tacklebox-looking-thing that I could use as a display for them. It’s been so much fun bringing this setup to both my own performances and other community events. You can find the digital versions of them all here. Get in touch if you want me to set up at your craft show, concert, panel, or other community event.
And here are the two new zines I shared this year:
- Recommended Reading on Gaza and the Struggle for Justice in Palestine. This is full of quotes and links to articles, mostly from the first few months of genocide, that I would recommend to people learning about this for the first time. It’s been a way to always have Palestine present, even at events that aren’t explicitly about it. It’s been a conversation starter, and a doorway into deeper learning. Please feel free to download the PDF and print/fold your own. Cover art by Natalie Hinahara.
- All the Threads Between Us: The Power of Poetry Clubs, Writing Circles, Open Mics, and Other Collective Efforts. I made it especially for people interested in the work of *cultivating* spaces of creativity and collaboration, whether that’s a teen trying to start a poetry club at school, an adult trying to put together a writing circle at a local library, or whomever. (Note: while the link here is to the zine as its own thing, I’ve actually integrated this zine into my existing “resources for poets” zine, and have been sharing physical copies all year: rather than two 8-page zines, it’s one 12-page zine).
Newsletter, Post-Election Resources, and Looking Ahead
We have a rough year ahead. The years we’ve just lived through have also been rough. I tried to share the most useful post-election resources on getting involved in activism and organizing here, and I’m still updating my running list of Recommended Readings here; I hope those can continue to be useful.
I have a lot of plans for 2025, but the unfortunate reality is that there is going to be some amount of reacting that is going to eat into my/our capacity to act. So I’m not going to debut any big ideas here or make promises I can’t keep. But I will say this: I hope we can embrace our fury, our cunning, our hunger for what is right in the years ahead, and keep working together to shape the world we want to live in.
One last note: another thing I did this year was finally start a newsletter. Social media isn’t dependable, and email lists are one way we can stay connected more directly. Please subscribe; it’s free, and I only plan to send stuff out once every few months.
As always, thank you for reading. Please feel free to reach out if you have ideas for how we can work together.