Jeanne, Eli, Felix, and River read and launch books in NYC

Four acclaimed trans authors based in Canada and New York read from their latest works: H. Felix Chau Bradley reads from Personal Attention Roleplay; River Halen reads from Dream Rooms; Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch reads from The Good Arabs; Jeanne Thornton reads from Summer Fun and/or new work. Personal Attention Roleplay is praised by Casey Plett as “a perfect album of stories”; Dream Rooms is described by Gail Scott as “a marvelous confection of the author’s definition of ‘revolution’”; and The Good Arabs as “bold and deeply necessary” by Liz Howard. Summer Fun won the 2022 Lambda Award for transgender fiction.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel

Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.

All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.

We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd.

H Felix Chau Bradley is the author of Personal Attention Roleplay, which was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Prize, as well as the poetry chapbook Automatic Object Lessons. They are the fiction editor for This Magazine and the host of Strange Futures, a speculative fiction book club. They live in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal).

River Halen is an award-winning, transgender writer of Catalan and Danish descent living in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Their poems and essays dealing with relation, ecology, transformation, and sexuality have been published widely in Canada, as well as in the U.S., Australia, and in translation in Japan. Their first book, Match, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and their most recent book, Dream Rooms, a collection of essays and poems, is praised by the Bay Area Reporter as “unique and mesmerizing.”

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a writer living in Tio’tia:ke. Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. They were longlisted for the CBC poetry prize in 2019. Their book, knot body (2020), published by Metatron Press, was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia First Book Award, and their second book, The Good Arabs, was published by Metonymy Press in September 2021, and received the honorary mention for the Arab American Book Award for Poetry. They are the non-fiction editor at The Puritan. They are also an acquisitions editor at Metonymy Press. They are currently translating Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay’s La fille d’elle-même from the French, forthcoming Fall 2023. With co-editor Samia Marshy, they are editing El Ghourabaa, an anthology of weird and experimental queer and trans writing by Arab and Arabophone writers.

Jeanne Thornton is the author of Summer Fun (Soho 2021), The Black Emerald (Instar 2014), and The Dream of Doctor Bantam (OR 2012). She is the copublisher of Instar Books and the editor, with Tara Madison Avery, of the Ignatz Award-winning We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology. Her fiction has appeared in n+1, WIRED, The Evergreen Review, and more.