About

Emji Saint Spero is a transqueer writer, performer, and pervert based in Los Angeles. They are curious about the potential of creative intimacies to queer the familiar, mapping the boundaries of collective engagement through movement, documentation, personal ephemera, and collaborative performance.

Saint Spero is the Programming Director at Poetic Research Bureau and Curator of Communicator Series, a monthly language-curious queer and trans* performance series. They are the author of disgust and almost any shit will do, and a contributor to Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects, a volume of artworks, archival documents, and artifacts of trans* life. They are currently working on two poetry manuscripts, exhaustion and a retching.

In 2013, Saint Spero and Joel Gregory co-founded the Oakland-based small press and queer poetry cult Timeless, Infinite Light and Omni Commons, a collectively-run DIY venue and community space. As Creative Director and Lead Editor at Timeless, they produced and designed publications with an eye towards the materiality of the book form and curated events featuring participatory, hybrid-genre work by emerging poets and artists. With Lauren Levin, they served as Co-developmental Editor for Timeless’ final publication, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, which was awarded the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.

Recent collaborations include UpMoon Station, a projector for various audio activities, radio selections, and sonic clusterfuckery with jeremy kennedy, streaming live on kchung radio from the red hot trailer at MoCA, and Trans* Temporal Resistances, co-curated with Leila Weefer in collaboration with the TurkxTaylor Initiative; this performance series invites writers and artists to deconstruct trans* archives and architectures, engaging Queer Time as an embodied strategy of resistance.