Eddie Maisonet

Eddie Maisonet is an interdisciplinary storyteller, teaching artist, and facilitator who is studying to add "dog trainer" to that list. He is a born and bred Boston artist whose 2017 and 2019 artist residencies at The Theater Offensive are collaborative storytelling projects documenting gentrification's effect on his communities. He creates hybrid poetry and prose narrative informed by his life as an Afro-Boricua, disabled, queer, and trans artist committed to centering themes of wellness in the context of disability, joy, collectivity, humor, and family inheritances.

His 2017 project was titled The QTPOC Mixtape Project, a series of free storytelling workshops transitioning working with 4 queer black artists to present a hybrid interactive performance and model storytelling workshop. The group's work was a response to the question of the unique ways gentrification impacts our communities. His 2019 project, titled Narratives of Home, is a storytelling project about displacement because of Boston's rapid gentrfication led by Eddie, Tatiana Gil, Letta Neely and Lina Pulgarin-Duque. They interviewed community members who wanted to share their experiences around the idea of "home". The interviews were transcribed and used to write a 5-character new play. Because of the pandemic, Narratives of Home is postponed.

In 2015, he graduated from Smith College with a BA in Psychology. He has been performing since 2016 and writing since childhood. His work can be found in the anthology *Outside The XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity*, on the Jaded Ibis Press blog Scarlet and featured in WBUR's COVID poetry series. When he's not doing his artsy stuff, he's gaming, thinking about dogs or cuddling his 7-pound rescue Chiweenie, Twinkie.