Queering Reality with Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Queering Reality with Akil Kumarasamy

In Akil Kumarasamy [https://akilk.com/home/]’s work, borders rarely stay still. They flicker, blur, and sometimes dissolve entirely—between countries and within them, across generations, between the living and the dead, the remembered and the imagined. Her stories move through these thresholds with a quiet intensity, asking what it means to inhabit more than one place, more than one self, at once. Liminality, in her hands, is not just a state of in-betweenness but a charged space where identity is continually made and unmade. In this conversation, we’ll explore how her writing navigates these shifting terrains—how migration reshapes time, how history lingers in intimate ways, and how her characters negotiate belonging across fractured geographies. We’ll also turn to the intersections of queerness and feminism in her work: how desire, power, and resistance emerge within constrained worlds, and how her stories open up new possibilities for imagining selfhood beyond fixed categories. Together, these themes invite a deeper look at the porous edges of identity and the creative potential that exists in crossing—and recrossing—them. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com [https://www.queeringreality.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Queering Reality with Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Melissa Lozada-Oliva [https://www.melissalozadaoliva.com/about] is a writer whose work moves fluidly between memory, myth, and pop culture, creating narratives that are as emotionally sharp as they are surreal. Known for her background in performance poetry and her genre-bending storytelling, Lozada-Oliva invites us into a conversation about identity, desire, and the stories we inherit and disrupt. In this podcast episode, we explore how she navigates the space between realism and dream logic, what it means to rewrite cultural archetypes as a Latina writer, and how performance has shaped her understanding of voice and truth. We also dive into her nuanced approach to the body, fragmented identity, and queerness as a creative practice. At its core, this conversation asks what it means to write toward complexity — even when it’s messy, uncomfortable, or refuses easy definition. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com [https://www.queeringreality.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Queering Reality with Torrin Greathouse

In this episode of Queering Reality, we’re joined by poet Torrin Greathouse [https://www.torringreathouse.com/] for a conversation that moves through the body, language, and the transformative power of queer imagination. Together, we explore how the body holds memory — and how queer identity reshapes what we inherit, remember, and reclaim. Drawing from the themes of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, we consider the ways language can both harm and liberate, asking how it constructs, distorts, and reimagines queer realities. Our discussion traces poetry not only as a form of documentation, but as a space for transformation and possibility — where new ways of being can emerge. We also turn to the question of what it means to queer language itself, and how reworking religious imagery can become an act of resistance, survival, and re-enchantment. At its heart, this episode asks: if queerness is a way of seeing differently, how can poetry help us remake reality in its image? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com [https://www.queeringreality.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Queering Reality With Sarah Barmak

Today’s episode sits right at the edge of something both deeply personal and profoundly political: female desire. Not the version we’ve inherited filtered through patriarchy, shame, and silence, but the messy, expansive, often contradictory realities of what it actually means to want. Because for so many women and queer people, desire isn’t just about attraction. It’s shaped by power, by culture, by trauma, by the quiet and loud ways we’ve been taught to disconnect from our bodies or perform them for someone else. So what does it mean to come back to ourselves? To reclaim desire not as something we owe, but something we author? I’m joined today by Sarah Barmak [https://thewalrus.ca/author/sarah-barmak/], a journalist and author who has spent years exploring the science, psychology, and lived experience of female sexuality. Together, we’re queering the idea that desire is fixed, linear, or even fully knowable. We talk about the myths we’ve internalized, the realities we rarely name, and the radical potential of redefining pleasure on our own terms. This conversation is about curiosity over certainty, embodiment over performance, and the courage it takes to ask: what do I actually want when no one else is watching? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com [https://www.queeringreality.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Queering Reality with Lilly Dancyger

In this episode, I’m joined by writer Lilly Dancyger [https://www.lillydancyger.com/], whose essay collection First Love [https://bookshop.org/p/books/first-love-essays-on-friendship-lilly-dancyger/853568308e3368cc?ean=9780593447574&next=t&next=t&affiliate=1925] refuses neat conclusions about desire, grief, addiction, and becoming. In these essays, love is both salvation and destruction, clarity and confusion — and Dancyger lets those tensions breathe. We explore how queering reality means resisting the cultural pressure to simplify our stories, how embracing ambiguity disrupts patriarchal certainty, and why paradox might be the most honest place to begin. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com [https://www.queeringreality.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]