Author Reading

California Girl Chronicles: Brea and the City of Plastic

3L Publishing

The California Girl Chronicles reveals the sometimes tragically misguided but often humorous professional and romantic adventures of aspiring filmmaker Brea Harper: smart, ambitious, sexually empowered, and spray tanned. Forced to work in the demoralizing world of “bikini hell” to make ends meet, Brea pursues her dreams of being a filmmaker, despite the constant distraction of her conflicting romantic conquests.

Glow

Viking

In the autumn of 1941, Amelia J. McGee, a young woman of Cherokee and Scotch-Irish descent and an outspoken pamphleteer for the NAACP, hastily sends her daughter, Ella, alone on a bus home to Georgia in the middle of the night—a desperate measure that proves calamitous when the child encounters two drifters and is left for dead on the side of the road. Ella awakens in the homestead of Willie Mae Cotton, a wise root doctor and former slave, and her partner, Mary-Mary Freeborn. As Ella heals, the secrets of her lineage are revealed. Tackling issues of race and lineage in the vein of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World or Amy Greene’s Bloodroot, Tuccelli’s Glow is a luminous debut novel full of ghosts both real and imagined.

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie

Riverhead

Like millions of American women, when Wendy McClure was a girl, she longed for the life represented in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series. In The Wilder Life, McClure’s heartfelt and hilarious new book, she describes her adult quest to find the lost world of Laura Ingalls Wilder once and for all. The result is an incredibly funny first-person account of obsessive reading and a story about what happens when we reconnect with our childhood touchstones. McClure is a columnist for Bust magazine and author of the memoir I’m Not the New Me. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on This American Life.

Join Captive Genders editor Eric A. Stanley and contributor Yasmin Nair
for a book reading, signing, and discussion of the recently released
anthology. 

Eric A. Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer politics, theories of state
violence, and visual culture. Eric is currently finishing a PhD in the
History of Consciousness department at the University of California,
Santa Cruz and continues to organize with Critical Resistance and Gay
Shame. Along with Chris Vargas, Eric co-directed the films Homotopia
(2006) and Criminal Queers (2012).

Yasmin Nair is a Chicago-based writer,activist, academic, and commentator. Which mostly means that she struggles to pay rent while living the glamorous life of a freelance
writer. Her writing and organising address neoliberalism, inequality,
and the politics of rescue and affect; the immigration crisis; queer
politics and theory, and the contours of a ridiculous gay movement that
pretends that the right to marry, the right to kill, and hate crimes
legislation actually constitute some kind of radical agenda. 

Are You My Mother?
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Swedish American Museum
5211 N. Clark St.
Doors open at 7 p.m.
We are thrilled to host Alison Bechdel, as she presents the highly anticipated
sequel to her bestselling graphic memoir, Fun Home. In Fun Home Bechdel explored
the enigmatic life of her closeted gay father; in Are You My Mother? Bechdel turns her
attention to her relationship with her critical mother and her impact on Bechdel’s creative
development and sense of self-worth. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly praised Are
You My Mother? as “A fiercely honest work about the field of combat that is family.”
Alison will be presenting a slide show, and refreshments will be served. Tickets are free
with the purchase of a book. The book releases May 1st but can be ordered in advance for
this event. Companion tickets are $7.00.

Girlchild

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Fierce and darkly funny, Girlchild tells the story of Rory Dawn Hendrix, the least likely of Girl Scouts, a smart survivor growing up in a Reno trailer park filled with lively and destructive fellow residents. Told in brief, hard-hitting chapters formed around various documents, including notes from the Welfare Department, newspaper clippings, personal letters, report cards, and a Supreme Court case summary, Girlchild is an indelible coming-of-age story praised by Publishers Weekly (in a starred review) for its “powerful writing and unflinching clarity.”

“This amazing debut spills over with love but is still absolutely unflinching and real. That is no easy combo to pull off, and Tupelo Hassman does it repeatedly with precision and grace.” —Aimee Bender

Anne Laughlin

Runaway

Bold Strokes Books

Special Guest Kathie Bergquist

With her life as a private investigator in Chicago firmly established, Jan Roberts can often forget where she came from—a backwoods survivalist camp run by her paranoid, dictatorial father. After risking her life at sixteen to escape the camp, she finds it hard to understand the runaway teenager she’s been hired to find. She pursues the girl into the deep woods of Idaho, in a journey that becomes a personal heart of darkness, where her past can no longer be contained. Laughlin is the author of the Goldie Award–winning mystery Veritas and is a 2008 Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow. Joining her will be writer (and Women & Children First publicist) Kathie Bergquist, a sister 2008 Lambda fellow and adjunct faculty in the Fiction Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago.

Shadows and Ghosts

Serving House Books

Froman’s debut novel tells the story of Ida Mae Glick, a critically acclaimed filmmaker who suffers a near-fatal heart attack when she tries to live on the same meager rations as a group of homeless people she is filming. Confined to her hospital bed, she confronts a past of substance abuse and failed love affairs, along with an angry, estranged identical twin and the ghostly Jewish mother who wants to see the twins reconciled, in a tale that doubles as an homage to artistic passion and the redemptive power of cinema.

Sappho’s Salon Emerging Writers Showcase featuring Liz Baudler, M. Shelly Conner, Ames Hawkins, and Allison Wolcott

$7-$10 sliding admission includes food and wine

Tonight’s installment of our popular salon night for lesbians and their friends presents four talented emerging literary voices. Liz Baudler is a fiction writing major at Columbia College Chicago whose work has appeared in Toasted Cheese and Half Nelson and is forthcoming in Feathertale and the Story Week Reader. Once a month you can also find her and her pal Dan taking your hard-earned money at the door of Sappho’s Salon. M. Shelly Conner is a Ph.D. candidate and instructor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is currently completing her first novel. Her comedic stage sketches have been produced by the Second City Training Center and the Black Ensemble Theater. She recently completed a musical stage play, Jump at de Sun, based on the life of Zora Neale Hurston. Ames Hawkins is an associate professor in the English department of Columbia College Chicago. Her most recent work has been published in Water~Stone Review, Off the Rocks, and Q Review. Hawkins has engaged in drag/queer/story performance in Chicago with Genderfusions, Northern Lights, and Second Story. Allison Wolcott started writing seriously after giving up a ballet career to injury and sloth. Originally from the East Coast, she earned an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where she was a Walton Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in The Beloit Fiction Journal, Shenandoah, The Jabberwock Review, and The Hogtown Creek Review. Door proceeds benefit the artists and the Women’s Voices Fund.

The Maid's Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the American Dream

New York University Press

In her revealing new book, sociologist Mary Romero follows the life of Olivia, the daughter of a domestic worker for an affluent family. Olivia lives with her mother in the “maid’s room” but is raised alongside the family’s children. The result is a complex story about belonging, identity, and resistance, illustrating Olivia’s challenge to establish her sense of identity and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion in her life. Through Olivia’s story, Romero shows how the mythologies of meritocracy, the land of opportunity, and the American dream remain firmly in place while simultaneously obscuring injustices and the struggles of the working poor.

The Four Desires: Creating a Life of Purpose, Happiness, Prosperity, and Freedom

Random House

ParaYoga founder Rod Stryker is one of the country’s leading yoga and meditation teachers. For more than three decades, he has taught yoga in the context of its deepest philosophy, making it relevant and accessible to students of all levels. In The Four Desires, he distills those teachings into a roadmap for achieving lasting fulfillment and becoming the person you were meant to be—even if you’ve never done a yoga pose.

Editor Miryam Kabakov and contributors Goldie Goldbloom and Elaine Chapnik

Keep Your Wives Away From Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires

North Atlantic Books

Reconciling queerness with religion has always been a challenge. When the religion is Orthodox Judaism, the task is even more daunting. In her groundbreaking anthology, editor Miryam Kabakov gives voice to genderqueer Jewish women who were once rendered invisible by their faith. For tonight’s event, Kabakov will be joined by local contributors Goldie Goldbloom and Elaine Chapnik.

Fires of Our Choosing

Dzanc Books

A boy acts out the death of his father and abandonment by his brother through a savage playground beating; a young man confronts his own troubled history when asked to hire his girlfriend’s strung-out brother; and a babysitter works through a scorching hot summer afternoon that will prove to alter her life forever. Praised by Jill McCorkle, who calls Eugene Cross “a wise and wonderful talent,” and Dan Chaon, who called Fires of our Choosing “a memorable, beautiful, heartbreaking book,” Cross’s debut story collection is filled with dark humor and deep insight into the human condition. Cross is adjunct faculty in the Fiction Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago.

Body of a Dancer

Etruscan Press

Told through interlocking essays, Renée E. D’Aoust’s memoir explores the brutal and passionate world of modern dance in New York City. As a student of Martha Graham Dance, the author tells of muscle and desire, day jobs and defeat. Dance history is interwoven with the stories of contemporary dancers as she explores the ties that bind her. D’Aoust’s essays were listed as notable essays in the Best American Essays collections of 2006, 2007, and 2009.

Penny’s Picks: 50 Movies by Women Filmmakers 2002-2011

FF2 Media

Because most professional movie critics are men, are moviegoers getting the full story about what films are being made and shown? And is the creative output of women who make movies, and the myriad life experiences that these films explore, being marginalized in the process? Writing under the blog name, “Penny,” Chicago film critic Jan Lisa Huttner has reviewed hundreds of movies by women filmmakers. In Penny’s Picks, she puts the spotlight on fifty movies released during the past decade, demonstrating the wide range of creative vision of contemporary female filmmakers.