Kirk Read is the author of How I Learned to Snap, which was an American Library Association Honor Book. He co-leads the Pacific Northwest Collage Collective. His collage has been seen in Contemporary Collage Magazine, Cut Me Up, RFD and Khora. He co-curated NO/STALGIA, an international collage exhibition of over 80 artists and What Remains Now, a group show of Portland collage artists. He had a solo show “You Should Have Gotten Here Sooner,” at Replicant in Portland. He co-orgnaized the Radical Faerie Arts Festival, featuring over 100 artists in various disciplines. He created the solo shows “This is the Thing” and “Computer Face,” for which SF Weekly called him the “Freak Prince of San Francisco.” He toured with Sister Spit and the Sex Workers Art Show. As founder and director of Army of Lovers, he produced over 300 literary and performance events in San Francisco and has been organizing artists and writers in Portland since 2020. He was the editor in chief at Virginia’s statewide LGBT monthly and has published writing in hundreds of newspapers, magazines and anthologies. He lives in Portland and works as a registered nurse with homeless people detoxing from street drugs.