Hey, y'all.
Hey.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll say, as a trans and queer poet, what you all have created
is just--
I'm already teary.
And to add to your tender and beautiful words
at the beginning, this feels incredibly special.
I wake up and it breaks my heart,
Cameron Awkward-Rich wrote in his second book, Dispatch,
in 2018.
Today is January 15, 2026.
And I too woke up this morning after going
to bed learning of another shooting by an ICE agent
in Minneapolis, more kidnappings of innocent people
by the slightly rebranded KKK.
And I saw that the regime and power
is on the verge of invoking the Insurrection Act.
I woke up and thought about genocide,
my trans youth friends losing health care.
I woke up and I thought about 2025 being a record
breaking year for anti trans legislation and violence.
I woke up and I thought, I don't know
if I can let my heart be broken anymore.
All I wanted to do was sleep walk through the day.
In 2014, Black trans icon Laverne Cox gave us a new term,
possibility model.
A possibility model is not a mentor or a role model.
A possibility model is a person who
lives their dreams in public, which
doesn't mean that the possibility model is perfect
or always positive or anything like that.
They are not the road to follow.
They are the embodiment of a concept,
possible from the Latin, that can be done,
that may be possessed of inherent strength, possible.
Widen the lens.
There's always at least one other way.
Shift your weight.
My guess is that everyone here is looking
at least for a possibility model for the page,
and you will absolutely find that tonight with both Cam
and Franny's readings.
But I want to actually how both of their writing
lifts off the page and encourages
us, by example, to make eye contact with the world
and enact the possibility of poetry in our lives.
That can be done.
That may be possessed of inherent strength.
I wake up and it breaks my heart.
Cam's second book ends with a cento, a form where each line is
written by another person.
It's a collage.
It's a way of recontextualizing words,
but it's also a way of saying, look at this line I found.
I didn't write it, but I need to share it with you right now.
I share that poem, "Cento Between the Ending and the End,"
write that down if you don't know it,
every chance I get because of what it teaches us about loving,
which is to say, training our attention on amplifying
the brilliance of others.
Which is to say, amplifying the possibilities of love.
This idea is carried forward in Cam's third book, An Optimism,
which introduces readers to Pauli Murray, the Black poet
activist, spiritual leader and self-described he/she
personality.
Here Cam writes, I, we all know, is an assembly,
and in this assembly there is history, nature, the body
and the mind.
Etymologically speaking, optimism
means looking toward the greatest good.
Again, that's not about toxic positivity.
It's a doctrine of trying to create
the best of all possible worlds with as little
evil as we can manage.
What I understand about living from Cam's work
is that the optimism is the assembly.
You here, me here are seemingly individual existences
constantly co-creating each other, especially here,
as Cam writes, in this century of wildfire, century of war
and perfect technology of war, where I live a happy life.
Cam's writing gives us possibility models
for reimagining time and each other.
And if we are lucky enough to wake up tomorrow,
may we reflect in the ongoing cento
of our existence, the brilliance of the people we love.
May we enact our optimism.
May we build the best of all possible worlds
here in this world knowing, as Cam knows, all the arguments
for and against my life.
May we wake up tomorrow alive to all of the possibilities.
May we not sleepwalk, but rather repeat, I woke up this morning
and it broke my heart.
Please welcome Cameron Awkward-Rich.
[APPLAUSE]