ALL PRIDE, NO PREJUDICE! A Literary LGBTQ+ Celebration

Thursday, 6:00 pm EDT June 13, 2024

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

This Pride Month, The Center for Fiction is back with our annual celebration of LGBTQ+ literature. Amidst increased book bans and censorship, we’re giving you the school book fair you always wished for, championing queer stories and LGBTQ+ authors.

Enjoy some special drinks and hear lively readings from a whole gaggle of amazing LGBTQ+ writers, including Myriam Lacroix (How It Works Out), Daniel Lefferts (Ways and Means), Michael Waters (The Other Olympians), Thomas Grattan (In Tongues), Serkan Gorkemli (Sweet Tooth and Other Stories), Lucy Sante (I Heard Her Call My Name), Christina Cooke (Broughtupsy), Roya Marsh (dayliGht), and Joseph Osmundson (Grandview). Hosting this special event are Amelia Possanza, author of Lesbian Love Story, and Denne Michelle Norris, editor-in-chief of Electric Literature. Join us for music, conversation, and of course, books.

It’s sure to be a night of all-out fun, celebrating the defiant power of LGBTQ+ literature!

Featuring

Myriam Lacroix

Myriam Lacroix

Myriam Lacroix was born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father, and currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing.
Daniel Lefferts

Daniel Lefferts

Daniel Lefferts was born in upstate New York. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has taught writing at Columbia and Rutgers. Ways and Means is his first novel.

Photo Credit: Nina Subin
Michael Waters

Michael Waters

Michael Waters has written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, WIRED, Slate, Vox, and elsewhere. He was the 2021-22 New York Public Library Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar in LGBTQ studies and lives in Brooklyn.

Photo Credit: Xander Opiyo
Thomas Grattan

Thomas Grattan

Thomas Grattan is the author of the novel The Recent East, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His writing has appeared in several publications, including the New York Times Book Review, One Story, Slice, and the Colorado Review. He has an MFA in Fiction Writing from Brooklyn College and has taught middle school English for more than a decade. He lives in upstate New York.

Photo Credit: David Horne
Serkan Gorkemli

Serkan Gorkemli

Serkan Görkemli (he/him) is the author of Sweet Tooth and Other Stories (University Press of Kentucky, 2024) and Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press, 2014; winner of 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Lavender Rhetorics Book Award). His short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, Epiphany, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Joyland, Foglifter, and Chelsea Station. He is a 2023-24 faculty fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and was a contributor in fiction at the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a fiction fellow at the 2018 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. Originally from Turkey, he is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He has a PhD in English from Purdue University and lives in New York with his spouse Jeremy and their beloved feline companion Leonardo.
Lucy Sante

Lucy Sante

Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy Award (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She recently retired after twenty-four years teaching at Bard College.

Photo Credit: Jem Cohen
Christina Cooke

Christina Cooke

Christina Cooke’s writing has previously appeared in the Caribbean Writer, Prairie Schooner, PRISM International, Epiphany: A Literary Journal, and elsewhere. A MacDowell Fellow, Journey Prize winner, and Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award winner, she holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of New Brunswick and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Born in Jamaica, Christina is now a Canadian citizen who lives and writes in New York City.

Photo Credit: Eli Jules
Roya Marsh

Roya Marsh

Bronx, New York native, Roya Marsh is a poet, performer, educator and activist. She is the author of dayliGht, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry and the forthcoming Savings Time (MCDxFSG). Roya works feverishly toward Queer liberation and dismantling white supremacy. She is the co-founder of the Bronx Poet Laureate, a PEN America Emerging Voices Mentor, Lambda Literary faculty and the awardee of the Lotos Foundation Prize for poetry.

Roya’s work has been featured in numerous places including, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry magazine, the Village Voice, Nylon magazine, Huffington Post, the Root, Button Poetry, BAM, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, The Apollo Theater, Lexus Verses and Flow, On One with Angela Rye, BET, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket 2018).
Joseph Osmundson

Joseph Osmundson

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer.

Photo Credit: Ted Ely
Amelia Possanza

Amelia Possanza

Amelia Possanza is a full-time book publicist and part-time writer. Her debut book Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives came out in 2023 from Catapult in the U.S. and Square Peg in the U.K. and was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR, Shelf Awareness, and Publishers Weekly. Her work has also appeared in the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, LitHub, Electric Literature, the Millions, and NPR’s Invisibilia.

Photo Credit: Becca Farsace
Denne Michelle Norris

Denne Michelle Norris

Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She is co-host of the critically-acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, is forthcoming from Random House.

Featured Books

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How It Works Out

By Myriam Lacroix

Published by The Overlook Press

PURCHASE

When Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals. What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker—or sexier—would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee? From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of violence that unravels the fantasy, each reality builds to complete a brilliant, painfully funny portrait of love’s many promises and perils.

Equal parts sexy and profane, unsentimental, and gut-wrenching, How It Works Out is a genre-bending, arresting, uncanny exploration of queerness, love, and our drive for connection, in any and all possible worlds.
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Ways and Means

By Daniel Lefferts

Published by Harry N. Abrams

PURCHASE

Alistair McCabe comes to New York with a plan. Young, handsome, intelligent, and gay, he hopes to escape his Rust Belt poverty and give his mother a better life by pursuing a career in high finance. But by the spring of 2016, Alistair’s plan has come undone: His fantasy banking job has eluded him, he’s mired in student debt, and in his desperation he’s gone to work for an enigmatic billionaire whose ambitions turn out to be far darker than Alistair could have imagined. By the time Alistair uncovers his employer’s secret, his life is in danger and he’s forced to go on the run.

Meanwhile, Alistair’s paramours, an older couple named Mark and Elijah, must face their own moral and financial dilemmas. Mark, nearing the end of his trust fund, takes a job with his father’s mobile-home empire that forces him to confront the unsavory foundations of his family’s wealth, while Elijah, a failed painter, throws in his lot with an artist-provocateur whose latest project transforms the country’s political chaos into a thing of alluring, amoral beauty. As the nation hurtles toward a breaking point, Alistair, Mark, and Elijah must band together to save one another and themselves.

Propulsive, exuberant, and profoundly observed, Ways and Means is an indelible, clear-eyed investigation of class and ambition, sex and art, and politics and power in twenty-first century America.

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The Other Olympians

By Michael Waters

Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux

PURCHASE

In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.

Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.
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In Tongues

By Thomas Grattan

Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux

PURCHASE

It’s 2001, and twenty-four-year-old Gordon—handsome, sensitive, and eager for direction—takes a bus from Minnesota to New York City because it’s the only place for a young gay man to go. As he begins to settle into the city’s punishing rhythm, he gets a job walking rich Manhattanites’ dogs. But it isn’t until he stumbles into the West Village brownstone of two of his clients, the powerful gallery owners Phillip and Nicola, that Gordon learns how much the world has hidden from him—and what he’s capable of doing in order to get it for himself.

A lush, heart-quickening novel about family and art, sex and class, and the terror of self-discovery, Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues chronicles Gordon’s perilous pursuit of belonging from the Midwest to New York and, later, to Europe and Mexico City. As he floats further into Phillip and Nicola’s exclusive universe, and as lines blur between employee, muse, lover, and mentor, Gordon’s charm, manipulation, and growing ambition begin to escape his own control, in turn threatening to unravel the lives, and lies, of those around him.

Anchored by winsome lyricism, glinting intellect, and a main character whose yearnings and mistakes come to feel like our own, In Tongues crackles with fierce longing and pointed emotion, further confirming Grattan as a rare chronicler of young adulthood’s joys and devastations.

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Sweet Tooth and Other Stories

By Serkan Görkemli

Published by University Press of Kentucky

PURCHASE

Queerness, labels, and allyship are central themes in this moving collection of stories set in Turkey, where Middle Eastern and Euro-American expressions of identity collide and naming one’s orientation is a fraught endeavor. An eleven-year-old undergoes hand surgery that will allow him to wear a wedding ring in adulthood. Two college roommates reach an erotic understanding as they indulge in dessert. A sex worker travels with an American same-sex marriage activist through the Aegean countryside. A passionate hookup during Istanbul Pride ends in tear gas. Two friends’ tempers flare over cold red wine on a hot summer night by the Dardanelles. A father bonds with his son and his son’s drag-queen boyfriend over classic Turkish cinema on the Mediterranean coast.

In Sweet Tooth and Other Stories, Serkan Görkemli weaves together interconnected narratives of four Turkish characters—Hasan, Gökhan, Nazlı, and Cenk—who search for clarity, love, and acceptance amid social change. Set in a rich mixture of urban and rural locales, the stories take place from the 1980s through the 2010s against the backdrop of Turkey’s transition from military-backed secularism to the rise of the religious right, local and global media representations of queer individuals and culture, and the emergence of affirming LGBTQ+ identities. Görkemli creates a complex, engaging network of plots about his characters’ struggles and triumphs in navigating families, communities, and themselves. Braving discrimination, they strive to embrace their identities and find joy, solace, and approval within a society that marginalizes who they are and how they love.
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I Heard Her Call My Name

By Lucy Sante

Published by Penguin Publishing Group

PURCHASE

For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, to drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates, on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life a performance. She was presenting a façade, even to herself.

Sante’s memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative: the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. Sante brings a loving irony to her account of her unsteady first steps; there was much she found she still needed to learn about being a woman after some sixty years cloaked in a man’s identity, in a man’s world. A marvel of grace and empathy, I Heard Her Call My Name parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, of gender identity and far beyond.

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Broughtupsy

By Christina Cooke

Published by Catapult

PURCHASE

Tired of not having a place to land, twenty-year-old Akúa flies from Canada to her native Jamaica to reconnect with her estranged sister Tamika. Their younger brother Bryson has recently passed from sickle cell anemia—the same disease that took their mother ten years prior—and Akúa carries his remains in a small wooden box with the hope of reassembling her family.

Over the span of two fateful weeks, Akúa and Tamika visit significant places from their childhood, but time spent with her sister only clarifies how different they are, and how years of living abroad have distanced Akúa from her home culture. “Am I Jamaican?” she asks herself again and again. Beneath these haunting doubts lie anger and resentment at being abandoned by her own blood. “Why didn’t you stay with me?” she wants to ask Tamika.

Wandering through Kingston with her brother’s ashes in tow, Akúa meets Jayda, a brash stripper who shows her a different side of the city. As the two grow closer, Akúa confronts the difficult reality of being gay in a deeply religious family, and what being a gay woman in Jamaica actually means.

By turns diasporic family saga, bildungsroman, and terse sexual awakening, Broughtupsy is a profoundly moving debut novel that asks: what do we truly owe our family, and what are we willing to do to savor the feeling of home?
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dayliGht

By Roya Marsh

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PURCHASE

Growing up, Roya Marsh was considered “tomboy passing.” With an affinity for baggy clothes, cornrows, and bandanas, she came of age in an era when the wide spectrum of gender and sexuality was rarely acknowledged or discussed. She knew she was “different,” her family knew she was “different,” but anything outside of the heteronorm was either disregarded or disparaged.

In her stunning debut, written in protest to an absence of representation, Marsh recalls her early life and the attendant torments of a butch Black woman coming of age in America. In lush, powerful, and vulnerable verses, dayliGht unpacks traumas to unearth truths, revealing a deep well of resilience, a cutting sense of irony, and an astonishing fresh talent.

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