The 5th Annual

Southern Conference

on Youth Homelessness

September 11-12, 2023

Atlanta, GA

Latrice Royale

We’re thrilled to hear a keynote address from the legendary Latrice Royale at our Southern Conference on Youth Homelessness in Atlanta next month! Latrice captured the hearts of the world and earned the title of Miss Congeniality on Season 4 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. She then went on to appear in other incarnations of the franchise, including multiple guest appearances on the show, RuPaul’s Drag U and RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, Seasons 1 & 4, and represented RuPaul’s Drag Race on Celebrity Family Feud. In addition to her guest star role on the Netflix series, AJ & The Queen, Miss Royale served as a special consultant to the writers of that show, helping shape the script and her character of “Faberge Leggs.” The Large and in Charge, Chunky Yet Funky, Bold and Beautiful Queen has toured the world extensively not only in group tours with her RuPaul’s Drag Race sisters, but her autobiographical one-queen-show, Here’s to Life, has seen sold out audiences in major cities all over the world, with an album of the same name available worldwide.

Da’Shaun Harrison

Da’Shaun Harrison is a trans theorist and Southern-born and bred abolitionist in Atlanta, GA. They are the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and several other media/literary honors. As an editor, movement media and narrative strategist, and storyteller, Harrison uses their extensive history as a community organizer—which began in 2014 during their first year at Morehouse College—to frame their political thought and cultural criticism. Through the lens of what Harrison calls “Black Fat Studies,” they lecture on blackness, fatness, gender, and their intersections. Harrison currently serves as Editor-at-Large at Scalawag Magazine, is a co-host of the podcast “Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back,” and ⅓ of the video podcast “In The Middle.” Between the years 2019 and 2021, Harrison served as Associate Editor—and later as Managing Editor—of Wear Your Voice Magazine.

As a speaker, Harrison has delivered keynotes and guest lectures at universities and colleges such as Harvard Law School, Yale University, Northwestern University, Spelman College, University of Cincinnati, Trinity College, and more. Their research and writing have appeared in anthologies and other texts, including Black Love Matters (2022), In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities (2022), and The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies (2023). As a public intellectual, Harrison’s work is regularly in conversation with thinkers such as Sabrina Strings, Kiese Laymon, Joy James, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Hortense Spillers, C. Riley Snorton, Jamil al-Amin and others on the topics of (anti-)fatness, (trans)gender and sexuality, Black Feminism, Afropessimism, and Socialist thought, to name a few.

Harrison’s writing has appeared in PhiladelphiaPrint, Scalawag Magazine, Wear Your Voice, THEM, Black Youth Project, BET, and elsewhere. They have also been featured in/interviewed by Black Power Media, The Takeaway, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times, The ACLU, The Fader, Teen Vogue, the New York Times, and a host of other podcasts and digital media platforms.