Strange Fruit

The Portland Poetry Series will focus on LGBTQ poets at their June event, in honor of Pride Month. Co-producer Eli Keel joins us this week, along with poet and writer Adriena Dame, who will read at the event. The series happens in the Tim Faulkner Gallery, once a month, and has been going strong since last December. While there's always a strong LGBTQ presence at the event, Keel says that this time, it will be more intentional than incidental. "We decided for Pride Month we wanted to really focus in on that, and not have it just be a thing that happened as we reached out to the poets that we know and love." We asked Adriena Dame whether her intersecting identities influence her work. She said that coming out changed her writing in ways she didn't expect. "I thought, ok well that just means that people will know that I'm queer," she remembers. But suddenly her poems and stories were populated with lesbians, bisexual, and transgender characters. "They became all of those other dynamics