Jody Chan

Jody Chan is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, community organizer, and care worker. They are the author of Haunt (Damaged Goods Press), All Our Futures (PANK), and Sick (Black Lawrence Press). They are the winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and the 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry. They are also a performing member with RAW Taiko Drummers. During their residency, Chan will work on a hybrid manuscript of poetry and essays exploring crip queer narratives and rituals around birth, death, and suicidality in relation to climate crisis, the ongoing pandemic, and the many past and future apocalypses in our and our ancestors’ lifetimes. In collaboration with other artists and movement workers, and via the multi-sensory, multi-access practice and ethics of disability poetics, they will also work towards creating audio and video pieces to accompany this manuscript, as well as their second book impact statement, which will be published in Spring 2024 with Brick Books. Chan’s first two books contend with how the idea of home is often weaponized by the state and intimately tied to the violence, trauma, and loss experienced by queer and trans disabled people. This project thinks through how home can be different, a site of safety and justice, building on a body of work by folks like Sins Invalid, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Stacey Park Milbern, Mia Mingus, and many more, in talking about crip lives, crip grief, and the worlds we build for each other.