Jun
3
11:30pm
Be Gay, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos
By Charis Books and More/Charis Circle
This event takes place on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance.
Charis welcomes anthology contributors: Sam Cohen, Venita Blackburn, Temim Fruchter, Alissa Nutting, and Emily Austin for a panel discussion moderated by Charis bookseller Abeo Chimeka-Tisdale about Be Gay, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos.
A trans woman makes increasingly frequent hoax calls to a business where she's had a negative experience, watching the consequences with perverse joy. A group of aging queers turns to bank robbery to stop the sale of their bungalow complex to a development company. As the president prepares to give a speech, two women lurk among the journalists, ready to shoot him. And an aspiring author takes to stealing items from strangers' homes in a kind of cosmic redistribution each time one of her relationships fail.
In sixteen brilliant, wild-eyed stories, Be Gay, Do Crime delivers a celebration and reckoning of why queer people turn to crime - unintentionally, as a means of survival, as protest, as rescue, or to right injustices big and small.
About the Contributors:
Sam Cohen is the author of Sarahland which was a finalist for the California Golden Poppy prize for fiction and is currently being translated into French. Her stories appear in Bomb, Fence, Autostraddle, Electric Literature, O Magazine, and others. She now lives in Los Angeles again and is working on a novel.
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the New Yorker, NY Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017 and earned a place as a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award among other honors. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world and was selected as one of the NYTimes 100 Notable and NPR’s most loved books of 2024. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary anti-Zionist Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. CITY OF LAUGHTER (Grove Atlantic), a New York Times Editors’ Pick, is her debut novel.
Alissa Nutting is a novelist and screenwriter. Her shows include the animated series Teenage Euthanasia on MAX and the MAX series Made For Love. She’s author of the novels Tampa and Made For Love, and the collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls.
Emily Austin is the author of We Could Be Rats, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Interesting Facts About Space, and the poetry collection Gay Girl Prayers. She was born in Ontario, Canada. She studied English literature and library science at Western University. She currently lives in Ottawa, in the territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.
About the Moderator:
Abeo Chimeka-Tisdale is a poet who loves tea, reading, listening to birds, and crafting. They can usually be found sitting in a pocket of sunlight, following their curiosity down research holes, doing yoga, or picking up a ridiculous number of holds from the library. They’re a bookseller and the Programming Assistant at Charis Books & More/Charis Circle. Their poems appear in Frozen Sea and Dead End Zine.
The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on Crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate.
Please contact us at [email protected] or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected].
By attending our event, whether in person or virtually, you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to Charis staff immediately or email [email protected].
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