黄瑤欣 / Artist bio

Born in Berkeley and home in diaspora from California and Taipei to Atlanta, New York, and Tianjin, Vanessa Huang is a multimedia poet, artist, and cultural worker whose practice inherits teachings from the prison industrial complex abolition, gender liberation, and intersecting social justice movements. For two decades, Vanessa has worked to shift cultural narratives and strategies based in fear, violence, and exploitation — and organize communities, institutions, and networks in co-creating realities centering love, vision, and transformation. Vanessa’s deejaying extends this practice, continuing to conjure public/digital space for sonic healing and freedom dreams.

quiet of chorus (UpSet Press 2018) is Vanessa’s debut poetry collection. Vanessa has received literary fellowships from Kundiman and Macondo, holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from Brown University, and has worked with racial, economic, and trans/gender justice organizations with a focus on decarceration, homecoming, and transformative justice. Vanessa’s interdisciplinary work and writings have conversed through community organizing, printmaking, and rallies; film, choreography, and sonic performance; letters to/from prison and with bread delivery through a community supported bakery subscription newsletter; and a range of publications including critical race and gender studies journals, magazines, and the anthologies Abolition Now: Ten Years of Strategy Against the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2008), Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011), Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011), and Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices (Trans-Genre Press, 2015).