HARD + GLAD

I am so so so excited to announce that my debut, the book-length poem HARD AND GLAD, has been acquired by Michelle Tea at her rad as hell queer as hell new press DOPAMINE, to be published 2026.

I am beyond words, really. H+G has been gestating since 2018 — I love it so much — a work about divorce, desire, and surrendering to the brilliance that is trans being. I. cannot. wait. to share it with you.

Watch this space.

A reintroduction

Thank you Marielle Chua for these gorg photos <3

Hello! My name is Amelia Ada. I’ve published poetry and essays under a few different names over the past 10+ years—in fact, as it stands this site is an archive of all the things I’ve written under all my dead and dying names. I love these things, if not the names, so here they’ll remain.

I’m also leaving up other past statements I’ve made about my name and my trans expressions (most notably the one about my initials from Feb 2022) as another kind of archive, of my transit. My vicissitudes and vacillations. I think it has value.

I’ve landed somewhere pretty amazing. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. I can’t wait to get reacquainted w/ you.

xoxo

Amelia


Why I publish under my initials

(for anyone who is curious)

My writing has always unearthed my identities before my rational mind has. Which is to say that I’ve always discovered who I am thru writing. The things I “write as” have largely been revealed to me after I’ve written. I (re)read myself to know myself.

A few years ago, as I reread myself in print, seeing my full name above my work started to feel wrong. The name didn’t belong, neither to the words nor to the entity I imagined those words came from. So great the disconnect, it started to make me nauseous. I had to look away. I didn’t know who “Christopher J. Adamson” was, and I hated that he—too stuffy, too Christian, too male—was taking credit for my work.

Privately, I began to sign my work with my initials. This gave me pleasure. My initials carried no associative baggage, for example of my assigned gender, or of my family of origin. I realized this baggage was the source of my nausea. My initials, such sweet relief, are just letters—among which I have always (unlike with my assigned gender and family) felt amended and at home.

I’ve been nervous and slow to make the switch publicly via my published work because, the glorious exception of H.D. besides, there aren’t many (any?) precedents for such a pen name. Was I breaking some unwritten rules? What would editors and readers think? Would I be googleable?—and if not, would I even exist?

Nervous and slow too because truncating my name down to three letters started to signal something more for me: my incrementally growing desire for genderfluid expression, a desire to take up the free mantle of some exquisite femme-ness and at least partially unbind myself from a masculinity that has never felt any good for me. (This has dovetailed with my years-long process of understanding that who I am and how I am often perceived by others are deeply at odds, especially when it has come to my gender.) To be known by my initials, representing myself with three genderless letters, has thus become for me an expression of a burgeoning trans*ness, my version of a trans* aesthetic. Which feels so good. My initials “decline to state” (to quote Marquis Bey in Social Text) what/who I am, leaving that job open to the work that follows them.

As I am more and more sharing this expression/aesthetic with the wider world, I am beginning to feel that deep soul satisfaction that comes with true recognition … for so long I have heard about this feeling, but I didn’t understand it. I didn’t even think it was real. But now, when I see my initials in print circulating in the world, I feel it—I recognize myself.

I’m writing this near my 34th birthday, and cannot help but think of myself as a late bloomer. Like it’s taken me too long to get here, wishing I had been able to see and announce myself sooner. I also don’t know if much of what I’ve written here will stay accurate in the next year—my self in constant flow and flux—but for now, this is it. My friends still call me Chris, as you may, but my name in the larger world shall be

— C.J.A.