The Just Kin Reading Series is a collective healing space intentionally curated by and for members of the LGBTQ+ community held on the second Saturday of the month from 4-7 PM at Semilla Cafe + Studio in Hartford, Connecticut.
Each workshop will feature a reading and Q&A with a Queer or Trans writer exploring the themes of love, intimacy, and pleasure, followed by a writing exercise, conversation, and ritual.
The Just Kin Reading Series is held in loving memory of Cecilia Gentili (1972-2024), Trans immigrant, sex worker, artist, activist, and mother.
Light refreshments will be provided via Semilla Cafe, Salty Queer Bakery, and Likkle Patty Shop. Participants are required to wear high quality masks (e.g. KN95 or N95) in the space unless eating or drinking.
Space is limited and tickets are sliding scale $0-$100.
The Just Kin Reading Series is held in loving memory of Cecilia Gentili (1972-2024), Trans immigrant, sex worker, artist, activist, and mother.
Light refreshments will be provided via Semilla Cafe, Salty Queer Bakery, and Likkle Patty Shop. Participants are required to wear high quality masks (e.g. KN95 or N95) in the space unless eating or drinking.
Space is limited and tickets are sliding scale $0-$100.
MARCH 9 | 4PM – 7PM
m. mick powell (she/they) is a queer Black Cape Verdean femme, an artist, an Aries, and author of the chapbook threesome in the last Toyota Celica (Host Publications, 2023). Their debut full-length collection, DEAD GIRL CAMEO, is forthcoming from One World Books in Summer 2025. A professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and a 2023 Tin House Resident, mick enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love. Keep up with her at www.mickpowellpoet.com.
APRIL 13 | 4PM – 7PM
Alejandro Heredia is a queer Afro-Dominican writer from The Bronx. His debut novel LOCA is forthcoming Spring 2025 from Simon and Schuster.
He has received fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA, and the Dominican Studies Institute. In 2019, he was selected by Myriam Gurba as the winner of the Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Contest. His chapbook of short stories, You’re the Only Friend I Need (2021), explores themes of queer transnationalism, friendship, and (un)belonging in the African Diaspora. Heredia’s work has been featured in Teen Vogue, Lambda Literary Review, Tasteful Rude Magazine, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College.
Heredia currently serves as Trinity College’s Ann Plato Post-Doctoral Fellow, where he teaches and writes.
MARCH 9 | 4PM – 7PM
Born in Medellín, Colombia, danilo machado is a poet, curator, and critic living on occupied land interested in language’s potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power. A 2020-2021 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, their writing has been featured in Art in America, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Movements Journal, Poem-A-Day, The Recluse, GenderFail, No, Dear, Long River Review, and TAYO Literary Magazine, among others. They are the author of the collection This is your receipt and is not a ticket for travel (Faint Line Press, 2023) and the chaplets wavy in its heat and to be elsewhere (Ghost City Press Summer Series, 2022/2023). danilo is Producer of Public Programs at Brooklyn Museum and with Em Marie Kohl, co-hosts the monthly queer reading, publication, and workshop series exquisites. danilo is a founding member of the People’s Saturday School and has previously organized with Funders for LGBTQ Issues, Lambda Legal, and Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement. They are working to show up with care for their communities.
JUNE 8 | 4PM – 7PM
Regina Dyton weaves social justice and intersectionality into personal stories. She has performed dramatic readings at pride festivals, queer community, women’s, racial justice and disability rights events. Regina is a contributor to the 2020 Every Kinda’ Lady Poetic Anthology, the June 2021 Chicken Soup for the Soul’s “I’m Speaking Now” and the 2021 CT Literary Anthology. She is the creator of “Queer Black History”, an annual dramatic reading project.
ABOUT JUST KIN
Just Kin is a cultural organizing project of the People’s Saturday School dedicated to creating sanctuaries where Queer and Trans people can feel at home and tell our stories, centering Black and indigenous people, (im)migrants, and survivors. Co-founded by varun khattar sharma and danilo machado, Just Kin launched with an arts festival in August 2023, which featured the Hartford premier of “(Un)Documents”, a play written and performed by Jesús I. Valles which inspired the project’s title.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
varun khattar sharma (they/he/she)is a Punjabi Queer non-binary facilitator, writer, designer, curator, strategist, uncle, auntie, and survivor living in Hartford, Connecticut.
They are a Co-Op Navigator Fellow with reSET, a co-founder of the People’s Saturday School, and a facilitator with Co-Creating Effective & Inclusive Organizations and Beyond Diversity 101. They previously co-curated “Homoland Security: Come In Gurl!” (2021), UndocuPoetry Week (2020) and “Breaking Bread & Borders: Conversations about Food, Migration & Home” (2020).
A former high school teacher and community organizer, they believe deeply in our capacity and responsibility as humans to heal and transform.