Please join us for an in-person event celebrating the release of THE THICK AND THE LEAN by Chana Porter! For this event, Chana will be in conversation with Dinah Grossman.

Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.

REGISTER FOR TICKETS HERE!

In Lambda Award finalist Chana Porter’s highly anticipated new novel, an aspiring chef, a cyberthief, and a kitchen maid each break free of a society that wants to constrain them.

In the quaint religious town of Seagate, abstaining from food brings one closer to God.

But Beatrice Bolano is hungry. She craves the forbidden: butter, flambé, marzipan. As Seagate takes increasingly extreme measures to regulate every calorie its citizens consume, Beatrice must make a choice: give up her secret passion for cooking or leave the only community she has known.

Elsewhere, Reiko Rimando has left her modest roots for a college tech scholarship in the big city. A flawless student, she is set up for success…until her school pulls her funding, leaving her to face either a mountain of debt or a humiliating return home. But Reiko is done being at the mercy of the system. She forges a third path—outside of the law.

With the guidance of a mysterious cookbook written by a kitchen maid centuries ago, Beatrice and Reiko each grasp for a life of freedom—something more easily imagined than achieved in a world dominated by catastrophic corporate greed.

A startling fable of the entwined perils of capitalism, body politics, and the stigmas women face for appetites of every kind, Chana Porter’s profound new novel explores the reclamation of pleasure as a revolutionary act.

Chana Porter is a playwright, teacher, MacDowell fellow, and cofounder of The Octavia Project, a STEM and writing program for girls and trans and nonbinary youth that uses speculative fiction to envision greater possibilities for our world. She lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Dinah Grossman is a chef, baker, and writer. She is a graduate of The University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Salt Institute for Documentary studies where she studied English Literature, Creative Writing, and Journalism. She is the Chef Owner of Spinning J Bakery and Soda Fountain in Humboldt Park which opened in 2015. Spinning J has been featured in The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Bloomberg Business, and Lonely Planet, as well as on Chicago’s Best, Check Please, and Good Morning America. She lives, writes, and cooks on the West Side of Chicago.

Accessibility: Please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com for questions or accessibility requests.

Image Description: A light red graphic with the faint pattern of open books. To the right, there are two large photographic portraits, one of the author, CHANA PORTER, and one of the interlocutor, DINAH GROSSMAN. Between them is a small photo of the book cover. The text reads, “Women & Children First presents Chana Porter in conversation with Dinah Grossman, Friday, April 21, 7PM CST, masks and proof of vaccination required.”

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