Call for Proposals Due Immediately! 

Art Contest for next year’s symposiums honoring Randall Kenan  

The Sexuality Studies Program supported by the Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life 

is offering three UNC students 

$333 Awards 

Deadline Extended: Tuesday, May 18^th by 5p.m. 

In the spring of 2021, the English and Comparative Literature Department hosted the first of a series of events honoring the legacy of the late Randall Kenan. Two Wings Take Flight featured a panel of scholars, writers, and artists discussing the impact of Kenan on African American Literature and Southern Studies and particularly Black Southern gay literary traditions. In the coming year, American Studies and Sexuality Studies will continue looking at Randall Kenan’s legacy with events on Kenan’s impact on the fields of Black Geographies and LGBTQ Studies. In doing so, we want to feature the creative work of students on all event promotional and program materials honoring Kenan.   

We will award three UNC undergraduate or graduate students $333 for a winning proposal to produce a piece of visual art for next year’s symposiums hosted by American Studies and Sexuality Studies honoring the late Randal Kenan. The art will be used on event programs, flyers, and websites. 

We are soliciting proposals for art with themes from Kenan’s novels and short stories (particularly: A Visitation of Sprits, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, The Fire This Time) from students. In particular we ask that your work depicts what it means to carry on the legacy of critically and creatively engaging with Southern Black Queer Geographies in North Carolina. The awards will be chosen by the end of May with the final artwork due by the end of August.   

We are asking for a QUICK TURNAROUND: Please go to this link and fill out this form by Tuesday, May 18th at 5p.m.  

If you have any questions, email Jacob Lau, Director of Sexuality Studies: jrlau@email.unc.edu.   

Lavender Graduation 2021

Please register by the end of Sunday April 18th. See link below.

Carolina’s sixteenth annual Lavender Graduation celebrating LGBTQIA+ and allied student contributions will be held on Sunday, May 9th, 2021 at 4:00 pm.

Lavender Graduation is a commencement ceremony honoring graduating LGBTIQA+ and allied students. It is a cultural celebration that acknowledges the achievements and contributions that students of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions have made at Carolina. Recipients of the LGBTIQA+ Advocacy Awards and Sexuality Studies Awards are announced during the ceremony. This year’s ceremony is hosted co-presented by the LGBTQ Center, the Program in Sexuality Studies, the Provost Committee for LGBTQ Life, and Student Life and Leadership.

Keynote Speaker

We are honored to welcome K. Tajhi Claybren (UNC 2014) as this year’s keynote speaker. K. Tajhi is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) in the field of community health-supporting youth and young adults (ages 12-24); black, indigenous, and communities of color; transgender and non-binary communities; LBGQ communities, and people living with HIV. They are committed to supporting the healing (individual and collective), self-actualization, and liberation of TNB/LGBQ communities of color at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. While at Carolina, she was a Ronald E. McNair Research Scholar, a program assistant for the LGBTQ Center, and the student leader of the Gender Nonspecific Housing Coalition from 2011 to 2013. K. Tajhi earned their Master of Social Work and Social Work Administration from the University of Chicago and is now part of the Integrative Empowerment Group (IEG) therapy collective in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Graduate Gift Box

Since we cannot hold Lavender Graduation in person this year, we are offering graduating participants the option of having their gifts shipped. This year’s gift bundle includes a 2021 rainbow graduation tassel, a copy of Pauli Murray’s Song in a Weary Throat, purple decorations to adorn your space during the ceremony, a certificate of participation, and a ceremony program. To protect participant privacy (particularly those who live in unsupportive households) gifts will be shipped in plain USPS boxes.

Participation Details 

The ceremony will be held live via Zoom. Registered participants will be given a link to share with their guests. Participants can register with a legal or chosen name, customize how they are honored during the ceremony, and designate the amount of visibility they are comfortable with.

Key Dates

• The LGBTQ Center will accept participant registrations until Sunday, April 18th at 11:59 pm.
• The audience invitation and registration link will be released by Friday, April 30th.
• The 2021 Lavender Graduation ceremony will be held virtually on Sunday, May 9th at 4:00 pm. 

Eligibility Requirements

Participants must be approved to graduate in the most recent Fall semester or the current Spring semester.

Participants must be one of the following at UNC-Chapel Hill:

• Undergraduate student
• Graduate student
• Professional student
• Doctoral candidate

How to Register as a Graduate

Register at go.unc.edu/LavGrad to be included in the ceremony. For more information please visit the LGBTQ Center’s Lavender Graduation page.

On March 31st at 5pm the Department of English and Comparative Literature (in partnership with American Studies and Sexuality Studies) will host “Two Wings Take Flight” a roundtable and veritable who’s who of writers, poets, scholars and artists engaging with the legacy of Randall Kenan’s work and Black Southern literary traditions.

See the attached flyer for details and to register. This is one event you do not want to miss!

Two Wings Take Flight Flyer

On October 21st the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will kick off a year of events reflecting LGBTQ+ lives and experiences with a conversation between Literary Critic, Poet, and Professor Stephanie Burt (English, Harvard University) and Dr. Jacob Lau (Women’s and Gender Studies, UNC at Chapel Hill). Burt will be reading from and discussing her poetry collection Advice from the Lights (2017), which “weaves together extraordinary sequences, including Stephanie poems about the poet’s imagined girlhood; poems on particular years of the poet’s early life, each with its own memories, desires, insecurities, and pop songs; and versions of poems by the Greek poet Callimachus, whose present-day incarnation worries (who doesn’t?) about mortality, the favor of the gods, and the career of Taylor Swift.”

Though attendees must register, the event is free and begins over Zoom at 7:30. For more information and to register:  https://events.ackland.org/event/nea-big-read-keynote102120/

Free virtual book discussions about Advice from the Lights will take place after the event from October – December. Once registered participants will receive a free copy of Burt’s collection. For more information on discussion dates and details see the link below.

The series and event is part of the Ackland receiving a National Endowment for the Humanities Big Read Grant and has been organized in partnership with Chapel Hill Public Library and Carolina Public Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Sexuality Studies has partnered with the LGBTQ Center and Honors Carolina Pride to host Queer MiniCon. QMC will be two days of online presentations, scheduled for October 9th and 13th, during Carolina’s ten-day observance of National Coming Out Day from October 6th to 16th. Dr. Antonia Randolph, Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies, will present the keynote address. Presentations will be open to the public via go.unc.edu/QMC2020.

In it’s first iteration, Queer MiniCon will feature seventeen presentations chosen by representatives from sponsoring UNC-Chapel Hill departments on LGBTQIA+ affirming research, lived experiences, passion projects, and creative expression. UNC System students, faculty, staff, and postdocs will queer, (that is to say, deconstruct or question assumptions around) everything from social network mapping technologies, in Katelyn Campbell’s “Lesbian Connections: Critical Social Network Mapping and Queer Archival Methods;” to self-perception and dream environments in Sergio Jiminez’s “blue-light-being;” and conventional ideas about masculinity within both dominant and Black culture in Antonia Randolph’s keynote “Wayne Loves Baby: Queering Intimacy in Hip-Hop Culture.”

For more information and a link to the virtual event please visit: https://lgbtq.unc.edu/news-and-events/calendar/queer-minicon-2020#