Apollo Chastain (he/they/she) is a transsexual poet, critic, and performance studies scholar from Chicago. Their poetry and criticism appear or is forthcoming in journals including Ploughshares, Poets.org, the American Poetry Review, the Adroit Journal, and Washington Square Review. Apollo explores how the body and self are made mutable by exposure to the environment via sex work and transsexuality. They are curious about how labor modulates our consciousness and relationality with both living and dead kin across landscapes from Midwestern hotels to the trans archive.
Apollo holds an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Monarch Queer Literary Awards. Their poetic and academic work has been supported by UCLA’s Cota Robles Fellowship, the McCormack Writing Center (Tin House), and the Smithsonian Institution.
Research and Creative Interests
Sex work studies, queer studies, space studies, critical theory, transgender studies, poetry and poetics, archive, labor history