Emanuel Xavier is a twenty-six year old poet/writer whose first poetry collection, Pier Queen, (self-published by Pier Queen Productions), reflects his experiences growing up gay and Latino in the suburbs of Brooklyn and then being raised in many of the houses of New York's legendary West Side Highway depicted in the film "Paris is Burning." His work has been published in Best Gay Erotica 1997, an anthology edited by Richard Labonte for Cleis Press, and in Urban, the Latino Magazine, phati'tude Literary Magazine and 'Ma-Ka: Diasporic Juks-Contemporary Writings by Queers of African Descent.