Hidden Histories: Crafting Queer Identities from the Past
Panelists: Joe Okonkwo, Debra Hyde, Scott Alexander Hess, Shelley Ettinger, Alexis De Veaux
Joe Okonkwo is a Pushcart Prize nominee who has had stories published in a variety of print and online venues including Promethean, Penumbra Literary Magazine, Chelsea Station, Shotgun Honey, and Best Gay Stories 2015. In
addition to his writing career, he has worked in theater as an actor, stage manager, director, playwright and youth theater ...
Hidden Histories: Crafting Queer Identities from the Past
Panelists: Joe Okonkwo, Debra Hyde, Scott Alexander Hess, Shelley Ettinger, Alexis De Veaux
Joe Okonkwo is a Pushcart Prize nominee who has had stories published in a variety of print and online venues including Promethean, Penumbra Literary Magazine, Chelsea Station, Shotgun Honey, and Best Gay Stories 2015. In
addition to his writing career, he has worked in theater as an actor, stage manager, director, playwright and youth theater instructor. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from City College of New York. Jazz Moon is his debut novel.
Scott Alexander Hess received his MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from The New School. He blogs for The Huffington Post and his writing has appeared in Genre Magazine, The Fix and elsewhere. He co-wrote the award winning short film Tom In America starring Sally Kirkland and Burt Young. The Butcher's Son, his third novel, was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book 2015. Scott is a native of St. Louis Missouri and lives in Manhattan, NY.
Debra Hyde has penned erotica fiction for nearly twenty years that spans the spectra of orientation and proclivities. Her short fiction and nonfiction has appeared in several Lambda Literary Award-winning anthologies and her own novel, Story of L, won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian erotica. A modern retelling of the classic Story of O, it updates the original tale to reflect the contemporary lesbian leather world and the women in it. She now pens The Charlotte Olmes Mystery Series, which chronicles the crime-solving adventures of Charlotte Olmes and Joanna Wilson. Yes, the famous Holmes and Watson cohorts are reimagined as a lesbians living in Gilded Age New York City! (Unlike their male predecessors, Olmes and Wilson are not prudish celibates.) Its second book, The Tattered Heiress is a finalist in both the 2016 Lambda Literary Awards and Golden Crown Literary Awards.
Alexis De Veaux was born and raised in Harlem, and in the early 1970s she joined the writer’s workshop of the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Harlem. The workshop was run by the late writer Fred Hudson. Under his guidance she won first place in a national black fiction writers’ contest (1972); published her first children’s book,Na-ni (1973); and the fictionalized memoir, Spirits in the Street (1973). In the ensuing decades, the tensions between the Black Arts Movement, an emerging black feminist movement, and, later, the Third World Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, were the backdrop for Alexis’s writing. Her work began to be defined by two critical concerns: making the racial and sexual experiences of black female characters central to her work, and disrupting boundaries between forms. In 1980 she published Don’t Explain, an award-winning biography of jazz great Billie Holiday, written as a prose poem. Alexis published a second award-winning children’s book, An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987) before moving to Buffalo, where she finished graduate school, earning a doctorate in American Studies in 1992. A project nearly ten years in the making, her biography of Audre Lorde, Warrior Poet (2004) has been the recipient of several awards, including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award (2004), the Lambda Literary Award for Biography (2004), the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, Nonfiction (2005). Her work is available in English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian. Today, Alexis is a celebrated writer and activist recognized for her lifelong contributions to a number of women’s and literary organizations. She has collaborated with the visual artist Valerie Maynard and poet Kathy Engel on the digital project, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been Terrorized?”(available on YouTube); and co-founded with Kathy Engel, Lyrical Democracies (www.lyricaldemocracies.com), a cultural partnership aimed at communities interested in working with poets to enhance existing social projects. With her new work, Yabo, Alexis has returned to her first love: writing fiction.
Shelley Ettinger was born in Detroit and lives in New York City. Her novel Vera's Will has been called "powerful, superbly written...a breathtaking achievement" by Library Journal and "a masterful novel...spectacular" by Lambda Literary Review. Her fiction and poetry have been published in many literary journals, including Mississippi Review, Nimrod, and Cream City Review. Shelley is a Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow, and has also received fellowships from the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Norcroft Writing Retreat for Women, and Barbara Deming/Money for Women Foundation. A longtime activist in the LGBTQ movement and in anti-racist, anti-war, and union struggles, Ettinger co-authored We Won't Be Slaves: Workfare Workers Organize--Workfairness & the Struggle for Jobs, Justice & Equality (IAC, 1997).
