FFR/Princeton BTGALA and William and Mary GALA Present... Readings from Recently Released LGBT Books! Poetry and Short Story Night.... La Shonda K. Barnett, JM Beazer, Emmeline Chang, David Groff, and Stephanie Rosenbaum

Come join us again at People! We'll be converging in the loft upstairs at People for another installation of our series of readings by out authors.

La Shonda K. Barnett, Callaloo & Other Lesbian Love Tales
Kansas City native La Shonda K. Barnett was educated at the University of Missouri, Sarah Lawrence College and the College of William and Mary. La Shonda's writings have appeared in numerous anthologies including: Does Your Mama Know?; Homestretch: Chasing the American Dyke Dream; and Hot & Bothered I, II, and III. She is the author of the short-story collection Callaloo and Other Lesbian Love Tales (New Victoria, 1999), has received the College Language Association's Margaret Walker Award for Short Fiction and was the 2004 recipient of the Money for Women/ Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Individual Artist Grant for Short Fiction. La Shonda's second short-story collection entitled The Sin Will Find You Out is forthcoming and she is currently completing her first novel, JAM! She is a member of William and Mary GALA.

About Callaloo & Other Lesbian Love Tales: Whether the women in these snapshots are cooking, going to an art show or spending the afternoon together, Barnett's youthful perspective and exuberant narratives reflect on intimacy across age, race, class and culture.

JM Beazer, "The Shower of Gold," from the Ten Little Nasties collection
Jolie Beazer grew up in Connecticut and lives in New York City. She's a MacDowell Fellow with an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She also has a degree in English/Medieval Studies from Princeton and a JD from Fordham University School of Law. Jolie's short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Ghost of Carmen Miranda and Other Gay and Lesbian Spooky Tales, Awakening the Virgin: True Tales of Seduction, Best Lesbian Erotica 1996 and Girls, as well as the journal The Harrison Lesbian Fiction Quarterly (vol. 1, No. 1, vol. 2, No. 2, and vol. 4, No. 2) and the magazine Pucker Up. From 1995 to 2000, she performed fiction readings in a downtown New York City cafe with the writer's group "Three Hots and a Cot." She is a member of FFR/Princeton BTGALA.

She's currently working on a novel called The Festival of Sighs, a suburban gothic about a gay brother and lesbian sister who fall in love with each other; a novel based on the life of the patient (whom she interviewed at a Vienna nursing home in 1996) that Sigmund Freud discussed in his 1920 case study, "The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman"; a pair of dystopian sci-fi novels called After We Killed All The Men and Bitch No. 5,193,112,736; an untitled collection of classic-style ghost stories; and a story collection called Ten Little Nasties.

Emmeline Chang, The Agony of the Leaves
Emmeline Chang is a freelance writer and editor in New York. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies EXPAT (Seal Press), Love Stories: A Literary Companion to Tennis (Kensington Books), and Re-Generation (Tarcher/Putnam), as well as in literary publications such as ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, www.mrbellersneighborhood.com, and Big City Lit. She teaches fiction and nonfiction at Gotham Writers' Workshop and in bookstores throughout the city. Emmeline has a degree in anthropology from Princeton and an MFA in writing from Columbia University. She is currently working on a collection of stories about tea (The Agony of the Leaves) and nonfiction about quirky people and places in New York (Tango Junkies and Taxidermists). Emmeline is a member of FFR/Princeton BTGALA.

The Agony of the Leaves is collection of stories about tea. These stories deal with people whose lives are connected over time and space by tea: a Chinese tea merchant whose life is changed by the Opium War, a Scottish woman and Indian ayah on a tea plantation under British colonial rule, the owners of a queer tea house in Taipei and the Taiwanese American who upends their world, an American colonist caught in the Boston Tea Party, and others.

David Groff, Theory of Devolution
David Groff is a poet, writer, and book editor living in New York City. His book Theory of Devolution was selected by poet Mark Doty for the 2001 National Poetry Series open competition and was published in 2002 by the University of Illinois Press. It was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and Publishing Triangle Award. David is a member of FFR/Princeton BTGALA.

He is the co-author with the late Robin Hardy of The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood, (Houghton Mifflin/University of Minnesota Press) and co-editor of Whitman's Men: Walt Whitman's Calamus Poems Celebrated by Contemporary Photographers (Universe/Rizzoli). His poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Bloom, Chicago Review, Christopher Street, Confrontation, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poz, Prairie Schooner, Seven Carmine, and other magazines. He has taught at The University of Iowa, where he received his MFA and MA degrees, Rutgers and New York Universities, William Paterson University, and with the National Association for Advancement in the Arts. He will be reading poems from his book Theory of Devolution, and from new work, about summer in New York City and Fire Island.

Stephanie Rosenbaum, Angelina
Stephanie Rosenbaum grew up in New Jersey. After graduating Princeton in 1990 with a BA in English Literature and a certificate from the Program in Theater and Dance, she moved to San Francisco, where she was active in the spoken-word and queer art scenes. Her writings have been collected in numerous anthologies, including Beyond Definition: New Lesbian and Gay Writing from San Francisco; Virgin Territories; Tangled Sheets; Pillow Talk; the Underground Guide to San Francisco; and Electric: Best Lesbian Erotic Fiction. She has also written two non-fiction books, a natural history of honey (Honey: From Flower to Table) and a hip wedding planner (The Anti-Bride Guide). She has explored food and sex, her favorite topics, in numerous ways, from posing for the cover of On Our Backs to working as a restaurant reviewer and food writer for numerous print and online publications. When not working on fiction, she edits guidebooks for Time Out New York and writes a monthly cooking column. After 12 years in San Francisco, a year in Europe, and various stints in Williamsburg and the West Village, she now lives in Brooklyn. Stephanie is a member of FFR/Princeton BTGALA.

Stephanie will be reading an excerpt from Angelina, a noir mystery novel in progress.

The readings will begin promptly at 7:00 pm. There will be an opportunity for question and answers after the reading. There will be some time before and after the event for drinks and mingling, and the authors will be on hand after the reading to autograph their books.

We thank Bluestockings for supporting this event and making the authors' books available for sale! Bluestockings is a radical bookstore, fair-trade cafe, and activist center in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We carry over 3000 titles covering topics such as queer theory, global capitalism, feminist studies, political theory, democracy studies, black liberation, and children's books. We also carry magazines, zines, t-shirts, buttons, and offer a community events board. Visit their website at http://www.bluestockings.com/

People is a beautiful bar that brings the SoHo feel to the lower East Side (directions follow). It's a marvelous place to have a drink and mix and mingle. For more information, visit their website at http://www.peoplelounge.com/

We especially welcome LGBT alumni from the ivy league and seven sisters schools, as well as our friends from Stanford, NYU, UVA, Duke, Williams, and Georgetown University. Feel free to bring your friends, boyfriends and girlfriends!

Directions
It's easy to get to People! It's just a block and a half below the intersection of First Avenue and Houston.
Subway From uptown or midtown, take the F or V train to the 2nd Avenue stop. Exit out the right hand stairs on the first Avenue end of the station. South of Houston, First Avenue becomes Allen Street. People is just a short block and a half south of Houston on the west side of Allen, between Stanton and Rivington.
From down town, take the J/M/Z up town. Get off at Essex. Walk west three short blocks to Allen, then north a block and a half.
Bus From uptown or midtown, take the M15 bus south on 2nd Avenue. The bus will turn on Houston and continue south on Allen Street. Get off at Houston and Allen and walk south a short block and a half. From subway stations on the west side, take the M21 bus east on Houston. Get off at 1st Avenue/Allen Street.

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This document was last modified on January 11, 2005.