Laura Marie Marciano is a writer, educator, and media artist whose work explores exit discourse, queer futurity, and the breaking of social binaries. Students in her courses are encouraged to consider societally-imposed binaries and internal editing in their work, and imagine solutions for writing beyond these limitations. Laura is the author of the poetry collection Mall Brat (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), a confessional and experimental work that addresses class, gender, and contradiction for a speaker who came of age during the economic recession of 2008. Laura is the founder of gemstone readings, a media collective that supports the visual media and film projects of women and queer writers. Her writing and visual work has been featured with Poetry Foundation, NPR, Brooklyn Museum and MoMA PS1. This year she will be working on a curation with RISD museum that explores visual poetics and challenges institutional expectations. Laura received her MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts from Brooklyn College, and her PhD in English from the University of Rhode Island. She is always happy to discuss collaboration, fashion, and Brooklyn, New York.