Nat Raha
What we wrote when Nat took part in Episode 11, 2024:
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) (Nightboat Books, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. 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, 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 is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024), co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine, and co-author of the article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’ in Social Text.

Artist Events

aquasomatics
Nat Raha Ailie Ormston
Transfeminist and revolutionary poetry, voice and timbral abstraction: a sounding and spatialising of reparative sonic and somatic practices that can speak back to violent histories of expropriation and ecocide.

Trans Breakfast at the End of the World
Mijke van der Drift Nat Raha
An informal conversation, over breakfast, about how abolition and movement work structures Mijke and Nat’s approach to transfeminism, ahead of their new book Trans Femme Futures.

I am not a nation-state
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Nat Raha
One of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation discusses practices of Indigenous Resurgence drawn from Nishnaabeg poetic knowledge.

Love Hangover
Hil Malatino Eli Clare Nat Raha
A joyful conversation discussing disability, gender transition and care labour as expressions of virtuosic and innovative skills that make care – good care – possible.

Trans Femme Futures
Mijke van der Drift Nat Raha
Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift undertake two intensive writing residencies at Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden and Hospitalfield in Arbroath.

Poetry is Not a Luxury: The Poetics of Abolition
Canisia Lubrin Christina Sharpe Nat Raha Saidiya Hartman Nydia A. Swaby
A panel exploring the poetics of abolition. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change.”

apparitions
Nat Raha
Transfeminist, communist, revolutionary poetry that refuses to flinch. Nat Raha presents new work in the nine.

Multilogics and Poetics of Radical Transfeminism
Mijke van der Drift Nat Raha
Underlying radical transfeminism, as an urgent critique of binary essentialism and fixed identities, is the call for a new kind of thinking that can move between and integrate the truths of all lives in their transformations.

Future Ruins: transfeminism, austerity and the archives
Jay Bernard Mijke van der Drift Nat Raha
Radical transfeminism aims to hold the space for finding relations between the ruins of the everyday. Emerging from the debris, spaces for politics find form as poetics to carry understandings, actions and be/longings.

Future Justice in the Present
Jackie Wang KUCHENGA Nat Raha
Thought and action, writing and protesting. A chat with Nat Raha, KUCHENGA and Jackie Wang asking what can be learnt from writing across genres by agitators, activists and abolitionists?