About Jari

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Jari Bradley is a black genderqueer poet and scholar from San Francisco, California. Jari has received fellowships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, and Tin House. Their work has been featured in the Huffington Post, and is listed by Blavity among "15 Creatives in the Bay Area You Should Know." Jari's work has also been published in Callaloo, Hot Metal Bridge, Nomadic Ground Press, The Virginia Quarterly Review, BOAAT Journal, and Punctum Books’ Anti-Racism, Inc: Why the Way We Talk About Racial Justice Matters. Jari has an M.A. in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University, and is a recent MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. They currently serve as Poetry Editor of the University of Pittsburgh literary magazine, Hot Metal Bridge.

The foundation of their current literary practice is the disruption of silence surrounding black genderqueer/masculine of center voices. Black genderqueer and masculine presenting women’s perspectives are traditionally ostracized from the mainstream articulation of the black experience. They write to expand the discourse of the black body which is often symbolized as that of the tortured black male. To achieve this, they write through personal narratives of trauma, memory, and their own masculine of center/butch/genderqueer identity, which serves as disruption to traditional depictions of black womanhood and the black experience within an American context.

Publications

• Trump 2016 ⎸Antiracism Inc.: Why the Way We Talk About Racial Justice Matters (Punctum Books, 2018)
• Three Poems ⎸Drunk In A Midnight Choir, Issue #3 (Summer 2018)
• Two Poems ⎸BOAAT (September/October 2017)
• She Wish She Was A Nigga  ⎸Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 2017)
• Lemonade ⎸Nomadic Ground Press (Fall 2017)
• Two Poems ⎸Hot Metal Bridge, Issue Number Twenty-Two (Fall 2017)
• When Being Pulled Up On by a DL Black Man ⎸Callaloo, Volume 39, Number 3 (Summer 2016)