Interview with Rebecca Kling

Monika: Today it is my pleasure and honor to interview Rebecca Kling, a transgender artist, and educator who explores gender and identity through solo pieces and educational workshops, praised by The Chicago Tribune, TimeOut Chicago, NUVO Indianapolis, the Coyote Chronicle, instructor at the Piven Theatre Workshop, author of The Thang Blog. Hello Rebecca!

Rebecca: Thanks so much for chatting with me, Monika.

Monika: Could you say a few words about yourself?

Rebecca: As you mentioned, I'm a transgender artist and educator. I tour colleges, universities, and theater festivals around the United States to conduct educational workshops and perform solo pieces focusing on gender and identity.

Monika: Is there anything like transgender art? What does it mean to be a transgender artist?

Rebecca: For me, being a transgender artist means that my work is being fed by my identity as a trans woman. I use my experiences as a trans woman to fuel my art, and my art to fuel my identity. I do think that trans art - like any type of identity-focused art - runs a risk of being boxed in; that someone can only be a woman artist or an artist of color or a trans artist. I hope that the work I do can speak to a wide audience, and not simply people looking for "trans" art.

Interview with Joy Ladin

There are lives that unfold quietly, and there are lives that insist on transformation, on truth, even when it trembles. Joy Ladin’s life has been both. A poet of rare clarity and spiritual depth, she became the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution, teaching literature and life at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. Born in Rochester, New York, into a home where Jewish tradition brushed gently against the secular, Joy always felt herself reaching beyond what was visible. As a child, she intuitively knew her girlhood, though the world called her by another name. Language became her refuge, and poetry, her mirror, reflecting back the questions she could not yet ask aloud. 

 

She studied at Sarah Lawrence, earned her MFA in poetry, and completed a Ph.D. at Princeton, each step carrying her closer to the self she had always been. By the time she came out in 2007, her voice was already unmistakable, lyrical, learned, luminous. Even as she faced institutional exile, she returned, not in silence, but in song. Through books like Transmigrations, Coming to Life, and her memoir Through the Door of Life, Joy wrote her way across thresholds, between genders, between faith and doubt, between estrangement and belonging. In her hands, poetry becomes a liturgy for the in-between, a testament to the sacred power of becoming.