Radar has invited poet Nat Raha to perform as part of the Gestation programme. Nat’s performance will connect to themes of queer and transfeminist world-making, and collective living as a resistant practice, in a lineage of queer and trans feminist of colour thought. This continues a dialogue between Nat and IAS visiting fellow Dr Sophie Lewis, who will be speaking as part of the wider roundtable events. This is the first part of Nat’s work with Radar, which will unfold in our programmes later in the year.

Biography

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance.

Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, forthcoming 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems (Vintage 2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). Her poetry has been translated in numerous languages. Recent performances include epistolary (on carceral islands), co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023. Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022), Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), New Feminist Literary Studies (CUP, 2020) and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is currently co-authoring a book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, forthcoming 2024).