Micaela Kaibni Raen's mission is to raise awareness about the dire need for global human rights reform while connecting, empowering and encouraging international activists and creatives. She is the creator and founder of Queer Tatreez.
Distinctions:
2023 Yalda Award in Poetry
2024 Nomination Pushcart Prize
2024 Nomination Best of the Net
Membership and Affiliations:
Association of Writers and Publishers
Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc.
HALA Collective
ACT UP! AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power!
What is Queer Tatreez?
Queer Tatreez is visual art and poems styled in the cadence and structure of the intricate
patterns of Tatreez. Looking at deeper complex mathematical sequences and
matriarchal matrices behind Tatreez, my intention is to take these intuitive
insights and formulaic computations to create a new visual poetic structure. My goal is create a processes to teach others how to create Queer Tatreez. And my wider hope is to educate people about Palestinian Tatreez itself as an artform, and the women/people/land it comes from as well as the conditions affecting them. I believe it will connect us with each other, our ancestors and to a deeper understanding of ourselves.
Who is Micaela Kaibni Raen?
Micaela Kaibni Raen is an award-winning published author and multimedia artist; a storyteller that teaches in the place where visual art and the written word converge. She is the creator and founder of "Queer Tatreez" a new structure for visual poetics and an inspiring teacher and performer with a conversational style, offering innovative workshops for creatives.
She is an Arab-American lesbian author, artist and mother. For over 35 years, her work has explored cultural, socio-economic, feminist, and queer themes. As a community activist, she has a long history of advocating for human rights in many displaced and marginalized communities including the HIV+/AIDS community, the homeless, parents living in poverty, as well as the need for protections for LGBTIQ youth in schools and foster care. She speaks out for international human rights reform with a primary focus on BIPOC, global indigenous and LGBTIQ communities. She is known as a voice for social justice through activism, literary artistry, and the design of multi-media visual art. Her vision is to empower and encourage diverse creatives to create and connect together in order to bring their voices and artistry to a global audience.
Her work appears in Bint el Nas; Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America; Koukash Review; Rowayat Literary Journal; Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art & Thought; The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology; A Different Path: An Anthology of the Radius of Arab American Writers; El Ghourabaa: A Queer and Trans Arab and Arabophone Anthology; and Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora. For a full list of publications, please click on the Publications tab.
