Calliope Draper (She/They) is a queer, transgender bartender and educator based in Edmonton, Alberta. Calliope’s bartending career has been defined in large part by their Queerness. Recently Calliope founded the independent Queer cocktail zine Places You Are Welcome, a project built to uplift and highlight the good work of queer and trans bartenders across Canada. Calliope’s overarching goal behind the bar is to create comfortable welcoming spaces for folks who otherwise are made to feel unwelcome or outright at risk. For her, bartending is both a creative outlet and a place for progressive change as it provides them the opportunity to share the stories and experiences of their community and challenge prejudice through normalization.
In their time outside the bar, Calliope is often found with their fiance AJ and their two cats Lucifer and Soggy, or out in Edmonton’s famous river valley looking at plants and birds.
Find them: Instagram