Author Event: Cavar on Madness and DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS

After a reading, the poets will be in conversation about the role of Madness, queerness, noncompliance, and refusals of normalcy within poetics as a craft and as a community.

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Cavar (they/them) is a writer, scholar, and teacher. They hold a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Davis, and their interests lay at the nexes of their own existence: transness, Madness, queerness, [and] disability.

Cavar is the author of the novel Failure to Comply, the poetry collection DIfferential Diagnosis, and six chapbooks. Their work across/between genres has appeared in numerous publications.

Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022), which won the Button Poetry Short Form Contest & was a 2025 Sealey Challenge Pick & LitBowl Best Poetry Book of 2022. Her debut poetry collection, Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024), was a finalist in the Broken River & Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prizes. Topaz’s poetry, fiction & nonfiction are published in The Drift, Waxwing, Passages North, Pithead Chapel, The Boiler, & others. Her work has received support from the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, & the National YoungArts Foundation. She serves as the editor-in-chief at Half Mystic Press & lives between New York & Singapore.

Mordecai Martin is a Mad Man/Psychiatric survivor, bisexual, Ashkenazi Jewish writer, translator of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry and prose, and aspiring photographer based in Mexico City, but always idolizing his hometown of New York. His work examines links between madness, family ghosts, miracles, cities, and love. He holds an MFA from Randolph College, and his published work can be seen in Asymptote Journal, the tiny magazine, JAKE, Honey Literary, and other places.