 Hi everybody. I just want to say thank you to Juliana, to Mason. I feel like you're psychic somehow. I totally agree with Vernon, but everything you picked out was totally me and I was like, yeah, so thank you. And to the Hormel Center because I never knew something like this existed and definitely as a college student when I was studying the blues and that's what inspired my piece, The Ephemera I Used. It's called Taint Nobody's Business, Black Queer Divas. No one ever taught me about this. It was really about the intersections of gender and race, but sexuality was always an afterthought. So it would be like, oh yeah, and Bessie Smith, oh yeah, and she was bisexual and let's go on and talk about her blackness or how she was a woman and had to go through all of these barriers to be where she was and to know that there's a place like this that exists where I can just dive in. I'm going to take my library card and go to town here. So thank you, thank you. And I want to start this off with a quote from Alberta Hunter, who's a blues singer. Blues means what milk does to a baby. Blues is what the spirit is to the minister. We sing the blues because our hearts have been hurt. Our souls have been disturbed. And for me, this is really important because the more I read and learned about some of the women who I so admired as a kid, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, they were literally the walking wounded and how did they become what they became? So that's what my piece explores. It's a conversation and I loved what they were doing so much that I went out of my genre, which is fiction and decided to dabble into poetry. So do not shade me at all or shade me silently, but this brought out the emerging wanting to be a poet in me. Yeah, and it's a conversation. The wound always pulses when you're black and blue, bruised and open for the world to see. Your blackness, your blueness, your trueness comes with a price. The ticket is steep and gives you the ride of your life into the darkness where all colors become one. Your thrust into the abyss asking, when will this be done? The snot comes out your nose, the tears roll down your face, the slush of vomit is ready to spill out, the bodies in a constant ache. How do you gather yourself in all this pain? This black, this blue, this price you pay? Tell me, Bessie Smith, I see you flying way up high. Tell me how you hold yourself. How did you reach the sky? Do I wear my best headdress and flaunt my gap tooth for the world to see? Showing them that the empress is here and the empress looks like me? How'd you do it, Gladys Bentley? You braved the troubled rivers of being black, woman and bull dagger. How'd you do it all those years? How did you maintain your swagger? Did you cry yourself to sleep or put on your best top hat to thwart the shade? Did you belly laugh at the haters, pull up a lawn chair and sip lemonade? How'd you do it? Ma Rainey, Ethel, Billy, Alberta, Faye, Ida, how'd you be so brave? Take nobody's business, nobody's business but mine. Take nobody's business, nobody's business but mine. How'd you do it, blue swimming? How'd you do it all the time? It was nobody's business. It ain't nobody's business. But you know that I know that you know that everybody's always in our business. Who you sleeping with? Why you dressed that way? Why you so gay? No man will want you if you wear pants and slick your hair back. Why you so proud? How dare you of all people think you're something in this world? Why you singing those lyrics so dirty, so sacrilegious, so yucky, so black? Why you so lavish, so larger than life, taken all up the space right here? It just isn't right. Black and blues women open and exposed. Floating in the abyss, did you ever get cold? Tell me how you did it, do it, done it. Tell me, won't you please? I think I'm a black and blues woman. I think I'm in need. I'm pulsing and shooting through the sky like a star, but the fingers point beneath me and tell me I'm going too far. I've taken every color and mixed it into one. How do you gather yourself when you're rippling out in the vortex and paying a high price, unwilling to be less than what you are, refusing to make nice? Tell me, tell me, won't you please? And it's a conversation, so the way the black and blues women I imagine respond is this way. Girl, make it big, make it pop and fly. Make it bright, make it shimmer, even if you die. We love a good show. We love a life that glimmers, but yes, the bruise you feel that's going to have to find its place in the soul. Every time you expose yourself, it's going to take its toll, but you better fly. Don't come back here if you don't. Don't you dare. We don't care. Fly up high until you burst. Thank you.