“Turning Death Threats into a Comic Book”

Thrilled to see I’m Afraid of Men on The Globe 100 as well as features on Quill & Quire‘s Best Books Covers of 2018 list, Bookriot‘s Best Audiobooks of 2018 list, and Flare Magazine and Toronto Star‘s holiday gift guides–all this week!

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“A rhetoric that is often used to gain acceptance for difference is “we are all the same,” which has always been deeply frustrating to encounter, and so much of my work is about resisting this idea of sameness. Why is that the only way for humans to accept each other is by believing at the core we are all alike as opposed to celebrating the fact that we are all different, that it’s difference that makes humans beautiful?”

Full interview here.

Article.

Featuring even this page is white.

“Shraya’s poems, in their direct, critical stare, turn back the telescope on the white gaze.”

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Directed by and featuring Kay Ray. Premiering on Complex.

“So often when readers engage with memoir or nonfiction or personal narrative, there’s still a healthy distance that the reader is able to preserve because…these narratives are in first person,” explains Shraya. “So a reader can slip in and out, and sort of disengage as they choose—put the book down, go to the washroom. For me, it felt really important that the reader was right there with me. If I was going to do the work of sharing this narrative, I really wanted it to feel like that the reader was just as accountable to me.”

Read full interview here.

Full article here.

“…The video is striking and sombre when we are introduced to plastic and, importantly, Shraya wrapped in that plastic. My pop cultural frame of reference immediately went to Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. But this is not fiction: it reads as a very real comment on what happens to trans women and men. News stories or viral posts about the deaths of the trans men and women who have been murdered often miss the vital context of them as living, breathing humans.”

Full interview and video on Noisey.