Celebrate the release of None of the Above with author Travis Alabanza, in conversation with Victor Yang.

Travis Alabanza is an award-winning writer, performer, and theater maker. After being the youngest recipient of the Artist-in-Residency program at Tate Galleries, Alabanza’s debut show Burgerz toured internationally to sold-out performances in London, São Paulo, and Berlin, and won the Edinburgh Fringe Total Theatre Award. Their writing has appeared in the Guardian, VICE, gal-dem, and BBC Online, and they previously had a fortnightly column in Metro.

Victor Yang (he/him) is a queer writer and organizer. His stories and essays appear in the Boston Globe, Longreads, the Chicago Tribune, The Rumpus, and the Southern Review, among others. He was a 2020-2021 Boston Artist-in-Residence. He earned his MFA at Boston University and teaches creative writing at Amherst College.

About the book:

In None of the Above, Travis Alabanza explores the concept of gender and their place in a world that rigidly and aggressively enforces the gender binary. Alabanza shares seven phrases that have been directed at them throughout their life—some deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or violent, some celebratory. These phrases act as a lens through which they explore attitudes and misconceptions about gender, illuminating broader issues within a culture that insists on gender as a fixed identity. None of the Above explicates how these rigid ideas of gender are enforced by people—on others, but also on themselves.

Drawing from their experiences as a racialized queer person, Alabanza deftly interrogates our current frameworks around identity with nuance, openness, and humor. The result is a meditation on doubt and language that turns a mirror back on society, and on ourselves. Featuring a foreword by Alok Vaid-Menon, None of the Above questions what we think we know—and shares new ways that we might live.