Milkweed Books
1011 Washington Avenue S
Suite 107
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. MASKING REQUIRED. RSVP HERE.
Join us at Milkweed Books as we welcome Casey Plett, author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning novel Little Fish, and celebrate the reissue of her debut Lambda-winning short story collection A Safe Girl to Love and the release of her new nonfiction book On Community. Casey will read from both titles, followed by a conversation with academic writer Cass Adair, with a signing afterward.
Alongside Casey’s reading from A Safe Girl to Love and On Community, we’re also delighted to have poets torrin a. greathouse and Daphne DiFazio, short fiction writer Alice Stoehr, and interdisciplinary writer Aegor Ray read and put their work in conversation with Casey and Cass.
We invite you to join us at this special reading at Milkweed Books, our brick-and-mortar independent bookstore located on the first floor of Open Book, at 7 p.m. for an unforgettable event.
MASKING REQUIRED at this reading, at the writers’ request
About the books
A Safe Girl to Love
Eleven unique short stories featuring 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 whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never will it be 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.
On Community
We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it’s slipping away?
We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges.
Looking at phenomena from transgender literature, to Mennonite history, to hacker houses of Silicon Valley, and the rise of nationalism in North America, Plett delves into the thorny intractability of community’s boons and faults. Deeply personal, authoritative in its illuminations, On Community is an essential contribution to the larger cultural discourse that asks how, and to what socio-political ends, we form bonds with one another.
About the authors
Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, and the Publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Cassius Adair is an audio producer, writer, and researcher from Virginia. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. Dr. Adair holds a PhD from the University of Michigan. His writing appears in American Quarterly, American Literature, Avidly, The Rumpus, Make Literary Magazine, Nursing Clio, Misadventures Magazine, Semiotic Review, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. He is a coauthor of the experimental scholarly book Technoprecarious (MIT, 2020) and is currently writing a book about transgender people and the Internet.
torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. Their work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity, Zoeglossia, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Her debut poetry collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, CLMP Firecracker Award, and winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second book of poetry, DEED, will be released by Wesleyan University Press in 2024. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Daphne DiFazio is a poet, performer, and graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was an OMAI–First Wave scholar. An alumna of Hedgebrook’s Writer-in-Residence Program and recent Best New Poets nominee, Daphne lives in Minneapolis and works for Coffee House Press. Her writing can be found at daphnedifazio.com.
Alice Stoehr is a writer who lives in Minneapolis.
Aegor Ray is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and organizer with the Sex Workers Organizing Project (SWOP-Minneapolis). His work has appeared in Peach Mag, MnArtists.org, and BEST BUDS! Collective. He was shortlisted for the 2018 Cosmonauts Ave Poetry Prize and was a 2018-2019 Loft Mentor Series Fellow in poetry. Aegor has performed in or created public art for Pangea Theater’s 2020 Lake Street Story Circles Project, Queertopia, Queer Voices, and Daddy. He is currently writing a short story collection of trans speculative fiction and paranormal romance. Aegor is a Sagittarius.