ADVANCED REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED
Fellow theater gays and Kuwaiti-Americans Barrak Alzaid and Dooks grew up in a society that suppressed difference and valued the normative. They were also each other’s first boyfriend/girlfriend.
As youth, Barrak and Dooks drew on theater as their outlet, and today they celebrate their queerness through powerful personal storytelling. For Barrak it takes the form of memoir, and for Dooks it’s standup comedy.
In addition to an intimate conversation that discusses how hardship and trauma can be composted for art, Dooks will do a brief standup set and Barrak will read poetry and an excerpt of his memoir.
This event celebrates the launch of El Ghourabaa: A queer and trans collection of oddities.
Barrak Alzaid is a writer of poetry, prose and creative nonfiction whose forthcoming memoir, Fabulous, chronicles his queer coming of age in Kuwait.
Excerpts of his memoir are anthologized in The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human, and New Moons. His poetry is featured in El Ghourabaa: A queer and trans collection of oddities. He has been awarded fellowships and residencies through The Corporation of Yaddo, La Napoule Foundation and 100 West – Corsicana Artist & Writer Residency. His fiction and poetry have been awarded prizes by the Barjeel Art Foundation and Nasiona Magazine. He is a founding member of the artist collective GCC.
Alyssa “Dooks” Al-Dookhi (they/them) is a Kuwaiti-American comedian, educator and activist living in Philadelphia. Al-Dookhi has been featured on CNN's United Shades of America and was a contestant on the Netflix karaoke game show Sing On!
By day, Dooks teaches stand up comedy and is Head Writer at Abortion Access Front, a non-profit that uses humor to destigmatize abortion and fight for reproductive justice.
