On April 29, 2026, the Unlikely Saints gathered at Bar Redux in New Orleans for a night of poetry, cupcakes, and fun! Poets Rachel Zavecz and Ching-In Chen read, along with C.W. Cannon, who was reading the works of his late child, Belle Brock Adelman-Cannon. Bill Lavender read too, but his footage is not included in this video, as it's going to be used for a different super-special project down the line.
Unlikely Saints, April 2026
Rachel Zavecz is a book artist, writer, and co-editor of the small press Carrion Bloom Books. Her book, The Book is a Tower Always Never Watching, is available from Cloak, and her writing has appeared in DREGINALD, Always Crashing, Fatal Flaw, DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame, and her PhD in Fiction from the University of Utah. She teaches at Loyola University New Orleans.
Belle Brock Adelman-Cannon was born February 10, 2006, in New Orleans. Over the course of their seventeen years, they excelled at a variety of pursuits, including languages (French, Hebrew, German), dance, fashion design, gardening, and writing. They attended International School of Louisiana, Benjamin Franklin High School, and the pre-professional program at the New Orleans Ballet Association. They worked at Touro Synagogue, Grow Dat Youth Farm, and Henry S. Jacobs Camp. Their spiritual cornerstones were queer identity, Judaism, and their beloved hometown, especially their Faubourg Marigny neighborhood. They were exceptionally charismatic, attracting a huge number of devoted friends. They died on June 3, 2023.
Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of Shiny City, recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) and The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters. Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on the Governing Council of Seattle's Cultural Space Agency and on the board of Seattle City of Literature. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. Photo by Cassie Mira.
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