All Over Albany

Andrea Gibson at The Linda

Poet Andrea Gibson is set for a spoken word performance at The Linda October 17. Tickets are on sale now -- they're $18.

Poets don't typically end up in the "star" category in modern culture. But Gibson's page has more than 76,000 likes on Facebook, and a Twitter stream with almost 27,000 followers. And Gibson has produced six spoken-word albums and published three books of poetry.

Gibson identifies as gender queer. From a conversation with Tig Notaro in Interview last year:

That just means that I don't necessarily identify within a gender binary. I've never in my life really felt like a woman and I've certainly never felt like a man. I look at gender on a spectrum and I feel somewhere on that spectrum that's not landing on either side of that.

And later in the conversation:

I think that I have a lot of repeating themes [in my work]. I just made a t-shirt that says, "Feelings are not the enemy." I guess that's what it's about--just being expressive with your feelings and the ways that we're culturally expected to closet our emotions. The idea that there's just a closet around love or sexuality is sort of hilarious. I think we're also that way with grief and panic and anxiety and depression, and I think we also closet our bliss. We're culturally expected to taper it all down. I would say that's sort of the theme of my show.

The opener for the show at The Linda is poet Sarah Kay.

[via @thomjob]