The HIV Writers Festival proves to delight and inspire as APLA Writers and HIV Writers Workshop join forces to bring you an afternoon of stirring tales. Come experience magical Erasure Poetry and exciting One Paragraph Stories. You will laugh and cry as your heart opens, soaking up Five-Minute Memoir & Five-Minute Fiction. 21st century oral delights will tantalize your imagination. Legendary storytelling will abound, spotlighting histories to be remembered and never forgotten. These powerful groups of writers push against stigma and shame to encourage the LGBTQ+ community to show our bright selves and shine our honest voices. An astounding afternoon awaits.
This program may not be suitable for all ages.
Participant Bios:
Brian Sonia-Wallace is the West Hollywood City Poet Laureate, a 2025 Rainbow Key Awardee and a 2021-22 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow for LGBTQ+ literary activism. He is the author of Maze Mouth and The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America with a Typewriter. By-lines include Rolling Stone, The Guardian, LitHub, American Poets, Rattle, and more, and his poems set to music have been performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Brian’s company, RENT Poet, creates custom poems on-demand on vintage typewriters. He has run a writers group with APLA since 2021.
Don Tinling is a gay old white cis gender male, oh my, who encourages people to hold space as elders and mentors with cultural humility in their hearts. He writes and makes art installations, videos and photographs. Metaphysical wonderings inspire him to explore connections of sexuality and spirituality, mortality and the eternal, the singular and the infinite. With a mission that is visual and literary his pedagogy hopes to realize the historical importance to archive and carve out intergenerational work and spaces. His writing started at the APLA Writers Workshop in 1997 because AIDS didn’t kill him in 1996. He has been facilitating the HIV Writers Workshop since 2007. He works to use his access and privilege to make sure all the voices of AIDS generations past, present and future are honored, and to guarantee the doors that let those voices through do not close behind him.
This performance is organized by Brian Sonia-Wallace and Don Tinling and is co-presented with the Los Angeles LGBT Center as part of Circa: Queer Histories Festival 2025, presented by One Institute.
The Los Angeles LGBT Center is a safe and welcoming place where the LGBTQ+ community finds help, hope, and support when it is needed the most.