Nat, Nina, Roo, Ellie, TreaAndrea, and Austen meet in the internet to imagine utopian queer post-collapse society via Avery Alder’s tabletop storytelling RPG of queer strife amid the collapse, Dream Askew. Craters, trash heaps, full moon party rituals, polyamory shenanigans, and exploding sporulating puffballs ensue!
With DeLesslin George-Warren (Roo), Ellie Yanigasawa, TreaAndrea Russworm, and A.E. Osworth
DeLesslin George-Warren (aka Roo), is an artist, researcher, and educator from Catawba Indian Nation whose work ranges from performance to installation art to community education to food sovereignty to language revitalization. From 2017-2019 he was the Special Projects Coordinator for the Catawba Cultural Preservation Project where he facilitated the Catawba Language Project (including developing and programming online digital assets such as the Catawba Language App), several food sovereignty initiatives, and other community education projects. Since 2019 he has continued to work for his tribe as a consultant on many projects including: language revitalization, food sovereignty, educational sovereignty, cultural healing, teacher training, grant writing and much more.
Ellie Yanagisawa (she/her/hers), also known as Ellie the Cosmic Jelly, is a contemporary artist living and working in Washington, DC. Ellie’s work is rooted in her queer and Japanese American identities. It is also a reflection of her personal journey of healing through the lens of radical compassion. She expresses through a number of mediums, including pen and ink, paper mache, acrylic paint, and digital. She has completed and assisted several murals across DC. Ellie believes in the power of activism through art and has mobilized community art builds with The Omi Collective, Black Lives Matter DC, Black Swan Academy, No Justice No Pride, Madison House, and more Black-led and QTBIPOC grassroots organizations.
TreaAndrea M. Russworm is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Series Editor of Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture (Duke University Press). She is the author of Blackness is Burning: Civil Rights, Popular Culture, and the Problem of Recognition (Wayne State University Press, 2016) and a co-editor of Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (Indiana University Press, 2017) and From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University of Mississippi Press, 2016). Additionally, her work has been published in The Velvet Light Trap, Frontiers, and Black Camera. She is currently writing a fourth book on race, video games, and the politics of play.
A.E. Osworth is Part-Time Faculty at The New School, where they teach undergraduates both fiction and the art of digital storytelling and previously served as Education Director of WriteOn. Their novel, We Are Watching Eliza Bright, about a game developer dealing with harassment (and narrated collectively by a fictional subreddit) is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing (April 2021). They spent seven years working for Autostraddle in varying roles, including as Contributor, Staff Writer, and Geekery Editor, where they mainly focused on the intersection of queerness and technology. They also edited cartoons and wrote about relationships and whiskey.
