Join author Cavar for a conversation with Diamond Forde about their debut novel, Failure to Comply (Featherproof Books). This conversation will touch on abolitionist craft-praxis, trans/Mad creativity, and anti-genre writing, and explore the intersection of scholarship, artistic expression, and political practice. There will be time for audience questions and a reading from the author.

Every story has its fugitives. “I,” a deviant self-hacker with three arms, two stomachs, and no name, is on the run from RSCH, a high-tech, authoritarian government that mandates wellness and carves the contours of truth itself. When I is kidnapped at axe-point to be mined for forbidden memories, they must struggle against RSCH’s medical abuse to recapture their history, reunite with their lover, and rewrite their future—or risk remaining Patient forever.

I crosses an epistolary, time-flipped dreamscape as they recollect their memories from RSCH’s hungry archive, and, in the process, write the story of their liberation. Cavar's Failure to Comply is an abolitionist text concerned with trans, disabled, and Mad liberation as a speculative art. 

Attendees are welcome to come and go, stim, and care for themselves as necessary throughout the event.

Cavar is a transMad writer-about-town, author of five chapbooks, and editor-in-chief of manywor(l)ds.place. They are a PhD candidate in cultural studies and science & technology studies at the University of California, Davis, where they’re working on a dissertation about anti-psychiatry, gender anarchism, and identificatory self-determination on the internet. You can find Cavar teaching bicoastally, as well as in publications such as The Rumpus, Kairos, Split Lip Magazine, Electric Lit, and Disability Studies Quarterly. They might also be at their local library.

Dr. Diamond Forde is the author of two poetry collections, Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021) and The Book of Alice (forthcoming with Scribner Books, 2025-26). She has received a doctorate in African American poetics and fat studies at Florida State University, and an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama. Forde has received nomination and recognition in the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery award, and as a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Obsidian, Callaloo, and elsewhere. Forde serves as the “Interviews” Editor with Honey Literary, as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville, and as an avid lover of colorful dresses.

Content Warning: This event may include discussion of institutionalization and medical trauma.