Please join us for an event celebrating the release of A SAFE GIRL TO LOVE by Casey Plett and ANY OTHER CITY by Hazel Jane Plante! Casey and Hazel will also be joined by Joss Barton. 

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 THIS EVENT HERE! 

About A Safe Girl to Love

A new edition of two-time Lambda Literary Award–winner Casey Plett’s acclaimed debut short story collection. By the author of Little Fish and A Dream of a Woman, eleven unique short stories feature young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love, in settings ranging from a rural Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn. These stories, shiny with whisky and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show that growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never predictable. A Safe Girl to Love, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction, was first published in 2014. Now back in print after a long absence, this new edition includes an afterword by the author that reflects on trans writing and representation in our current political climate.

About Any Other City

By the author of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian): the fictional memoir of a trans indie rock musician that reveals how the act of creation can heal trauma and even change the past.

Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang.

Side B finds Tracy, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city in 2019, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open.Motifs recur like musical phrases, and traces of what used to be there peek through, like a palimpsest. Any Other City is a novel about friendship and other forms of love, traveling in a body across decades, and transmuting trauma through art making and queer sex–a love letter to trans femmes and to art itself.

Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, and A Safe Girl to Love; the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers; and the publisher at Little Puss Press. She has written for the New YorkTimes, Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the Winnipeg Free Press, among other publications. Winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award twice, she has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She splits her time between New York City and Windsor, Ontario.

Hazel Jane Plante is a librarian, musician, cat photographer, coastal creature, and writer. Her debut novel, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) (Metonymy Press, 2019), received a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for both a Publishing Triangle Award and a BC and Yukon Book Prize.Her second novel, Any Other City, is forthcoming in April 2023 from Arsenal Pulp Press. She releases solo music under the name lo-fi lioness, hosts a podcast about writing while trans called t4t, and lives with her gorgeous cat, Gus, on the unceded ancestral territories of thexʷməθkʷəyə̓m (Musqueam), Sḵwxw̱ú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ(Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

JOSS BARTON is a writer, journalist, and spoken word performance artist exploring and documenting queer and trans* life, love, and liberation. Her work blends femme-fever dreams over the soundtrack of the American nightmare. Combining prose poetry, non-fiction confessional essays, drag artistry, and spoken word stage performances, Joss examines the myriad states of queer trans womanhoods from historical, political, and pop cultural identities of death, desires, dreams, and disco.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is an accessible space. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. Email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com with questions or to request accommodations.

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Tags: Casey Plett, Chicago, Edgewater, Hazel Jane Plante, Joss Barton, Women & Children First Bookstore