Emanuel Xavier - Professional Career

Professional Career

Xavier self-published his debut poetry chapbook, Pier Queen, in the fall of 1997 through his own independent publishing house, Pier Queen Productions.

In 1998 he created the Glam Slam, an annual poetry slam competition featuring four open categories such as Best Erotic Poem in Sexy Underwear or Lingerie and Best Love Poem in Fire Engine Red (alternately Best Bitter Break Up Poem in Blue). Winners of each category received a trophy and went on to compete for the Grand Prize title of Glam Slam Champion.

Painted Leaf Press, a small, independent publishing company which went out of business, published Xavier's novel, Christ Like, in 1999. Despite a limited press run, the novel was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.

In 2000, Xavier hosted the Lambda Literary Awards ceremony in New York.

Soon after 9/11, Xavier was one of the leading forces behind Words to Comfort, a poetry benefit held at the New School.

Xavier edited the 2005 anthology Bullets & Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry, earning him his second Lambda Literary Award nomination.

He was featured on television on Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry on HBO (Seasons 3 & 5) and In The Life on PBS. He also appeared in the Wolfgang Busch documentary How Do I Look. He also co-starred in the feature film The Ski Trip which aired on LOGO.

In 2008, he appeared in The Cult of Sincerity, a feature film that premiered on YouTube and later aired on PBS. That year, he edited the anthology Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry, which gathered the work of openly gay poets from the Latino community. In 2009, he appeared at a Fight The California H8 protest in New York to read his poem, "Children of Magdalene". In 2009, Xavier headlined an event at El Museo del Barrio entitled, Spic Up! Speak Out! Due to public outcry, the event organizers changed the name to Speak Up! and issued a formal apology. Regarding his personal use of the word spic, Xavier told The New York Times, "For me, it's about empowerment. Look at everything we have done and accomplished. And it is a play on the word. We are speaking out our truths and identities in very perfect English. . . . spic is a word that we can re-appropriate, that was used to oppress us and box us in a negative way."

Regarding his career, he has been quoted to say, “I think at the beginning it was about me, about sharing my story. But as it evolved, it became more about the larger picture, hoping to inspire others not to follow that path, that it wasn’t the only way to go if you were gay, a person of color, and thrown out because you were gay. That it wasn’t the only option.”