May 17, 2026 | Sunday @ 3:30PM | Purgatory (675 Central Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11207)

Shake off the winter with Kaya Press as Literaoke returns to NYC! Come see performers sing their hearts out to their favorite karaoke bangers and then read from their work.

Featuring:

Helyn Chen-Zheng
IG: @helynchenzheng.pdf

Helyn Chen-Zheng is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her writing has been featured in MudRoom, jmww, Sine Theta, Eater, and others. She is a Friday’s child.

Es Lv
Part of taiwan’s diaspora, es lv has lived in many places and through various occupations. In art framing, in solidarity movements, in seasonal work, and many others. In their writing live those nested sensibilities, generative tensions, and the camaraderie.

Kaz Rejsek
IG: @letsgetadog
Substack: @nosepicking

Kaz Rejsek is a poet, filmmaker, and regular at Branded Saloon’s warrrzone karaoke. Their work has been featured in small presses and publications and explores archive, mortality, and metaphorical dogs. Kaz works as an editor at the Academy of American Poets and teaches at The College of New Jersey.

Caitlin So
IG: @sooooocait

Born and raised in Queens, Caitlin Taylor So is a Chinese-Vietnamese writer with words in Business Insider, PopSugar, WebMD, Medscape, The New Absurdist, Her Campus Media, and Uncharted. She’s always preparing for her next concert or movie night and polishing the Funko Pops that watch her sleep. She graduated from Emerson College with a degree in publishing and marketing.

Carter Teng
IG: @chrysanthemumbreath
Substack: @chrysanthemumbreath

Writing under the pen name Yunyu Teng, Carter draws from her origins in Manchuria and childhood in the American South to write in the self-termed genre of Sino Gothic, a descendant of Southern Gothic literature exploring themes of diaspora, family, and placemaking and colored by elements of the supernatural and Chinese mythology. Her fiction has been published in “Vellichor Literary Issue 07: Folklore,” “Bloodletter Magazine Issue Six: Play,” and “Gluttony: Swim Press Issue 09.” She just completed her first year in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at The New School.

Tray Tsui
Insta: @trays-pictures

Tray Tsui is a Brooklyn-based queer artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work investigates the links and ruptures between mass culture, collective memory, and personal narrative through visual storytelling. Utilizing autoethnography, performance, found footage appropriation, and narrative film production, Tray works to redress the systems of representation across cinema, digital media, and networked culture that erase, distort, flatten, and pathologize experiences outside normative frameworks of identity, embodiment, and social legibility.

Irene Villaseñor
IG: @irenesenor

Irene Villaseñor is a poet and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores Indigeneity, injustice, care, and queer belonging. Her writing appears in Queer Nature: An Ecoqueer Poetry Anthology, Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, Nat. Brut, Yellow Medicine Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Cream City Review, among others. Her manuscript Get Lost Colonizer: Erasures from the Future was a runner-up for the Center for Book Arts’ Annual Chapbook Contest.