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A brief video about the inspiration for her first novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir

Enjoy this sneak peak of the highly anticipated first novel by jia qing wilson-yang.

jia qing wilson-yang wanted Small Beauty to be a trans narrative that caught readers off guard: “A lot of the things that I’ve read about and by trans women have cities as such a huge focus. And I wanted to have some sort of reflection of us in other places.” She also “wanted to have a book that wasn’t really about being trans or coming out, but where being a trans woman was still central to what was happening in the book.”

So we’ve been calling She Is Sitting in the Night a collaboration, but if it was that it was largely retroactive—a conversation that started in part before I was born. Literally. Ruth West started working on Thea’s Tarot when I was not yet a zygote, a fact that she is happy to emphasize with phrases like “back when dirt was new,” “when god was a girl, and “you don’t understand because you’re not old enough.”