M Téllez

• Website: http://www.cyborgmemoirs.com/

M Téllez is a hybrid mestizx cyborg who writes and performs speculative fiction about bodies/objectification, intimacy/class, neighborhood/land/community, and the violence in relying on binaries to order the world. They were born and raised by the city of Philadelphia, built by stolen bodies on the stolen lands of the now displaced Lenni Lenape. M is frustrated/pissed with institutional legitimacy/charity, anti-blackness by white forgetting, and fixed treatments of language and identity. They serve as Minister of Crossroads and founding member of METROPOLARITY, a corner store sci-fi & action collective that uses speculative thinking as a shield and wand against standing empire. They consider the common word a handy and inexpensive tool for deconstructing oppressive world-ordering narratives.

This fall M appears in two trans speculative fiction anthologies: Meanwhile, Elsewhere (Topside Press) and Transcendent 2 (Lethe Press). They have worked and performed alongside METROPOLARITY at such institutions as the Philadelphia Free Library, LIVE at Kelly Writer’s House, Vox Populi, New York’s New Museumand Recess Gallery, among many other places of wonder and ill repute. METROPOLARITY’s debut book, Style of Attack Report (2016), was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in “LGBTQ SF/F/Horror“ They are a recipient of the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award (2015) and Art & Change Grant (2014). Their zines have been assigned alongside LeGuin and Butler in University of Penn English department classrooms and saints know where else. M thinks that this format of listing institutional accolades is classist, tiresome, and insulting to people everywhere with the wisdom, action, and knowledge that the institutions of capitalist empire will never honor.