Hennebach Series – Queerness, Illusion, and Art

The artist and poet Nicky Beer will discuss Queerness, Illusion, and Art: When is illusion an effective way of revealing truth? How can artifice interrogate and undermine gender expectations? Poet Nicky Beer will read from Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, a poetry collection that explores camouflage, fraud, forgery, and deception, and discuss the ways that queerness informs this project.

BIO: Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lambda Award for Bisexual Poetry. Her first two books, The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) and The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015), were both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.