Between the Lines

A reading of fiction, history & memoir featuring Cheryl Head, Larry Benjamin, Michael Ward & Sarah Prager. Moderated by David Eye. Sarah Prager is an advocate for queer history education particularly for youth. Her first book, Queer, There, and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World will be published by HarperCollins on May 23, 2017. Sarah created Quist, a free mobile app that brings LGBTQ and HIV history to life with a following of over 35,000 from over 100 countries. Sarah's writing has been published in The Advocate, Huffington Post, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, It Gets Better Project's blog, and various other newspapers, magazines, and blogs. She has been a guest on HuffPost Live, the Michelangelo Signorile Show on Sirius XM Progress Radio, and The List on ABC2. GO Magazine named her one of the 13 Red Hot Entrepreneurs of 2013. In 2014 she worked with Apple and Google to make their tech policies more inclusive of bisexual terms. She was also invited to the White House to contribute on LGBTQ tech issues that year. She lives with her wife, their daughter, and three cats in Wallingford, CT. Michael Ward is a retired psychotherapist. He was instrumental in the development of The Shared Heart (William Morrow, 1997), which presents the portraits and coming-out stories of forty gay and lesbian teenagers. The Shared Heart won the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award in the nonfiction category in 1998. It was also on ALA's Best Books for Young Adults list in 1999. Michael’s memoir, The Sea Is Quiet Tonight, was published on November 1, 2016, and deals with the early AIDS epidemic in Boston and the death of his partner, Mark Halberstadt. The book was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2016 and won the 2016 Forward Indies Honorable Mention Award for Autobiography and Memoir. Happily married, Michael lives on Cape Cod with his husband, Moe, and cat, Jack. Bronx-born wordsmith and award-winning author, Larry Benjamin considers himself less a writer than an artist whose chosen medium is the written word rather than clay or paint or bronze. His passion is words. His semi-autobiographical novel, Unbroken, is both a 2014 Lambda Literary finalist, and a 2014 IPPY (Independent Publishers Book Award) Gold medalist. Damaged Angels, a collection of short stories, first published by Bold Strokes Books in October 2012 (electronic edition), with a paperback edition published in 2013 by Beaten Track, is a 2013 Rainbow Award Runner-Up in the Gay Contemporary General Fiction category. His debut novel, What Binds Us, was released by Carina Press in March 2012. Larry is a writer of gay-affirming stories of love, grit, passion, and family. His characters are determined to find their place in the world; if they cannot find a place, they make a place. Even when their lives aren't perfect, it's never because they’re gay but because they're human. And like all humans they often suffer the consequences of ego and bad judgment. Larry believes life is a series of starts and stops, beginnings and endings, and that sometimes it is in an ending we find our beginning. He tries to reflect those beliefs in his writing. Larry lives in Philadelphia with Stanley, his husband, and their two rescue dogs. Cheryl A. Head is inspired by storytelling in all forms. Much of her writing involves themes of diversity—often with a bit of danger, but always with a lot of humor, food and music. Head’s first book, Long Way Home: A World War II Novel, explores the dynamics of personal courage, race and sexual identity. It was a 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in the African American Literature, and Historical Fiction categories. Her second novel, Bury Me When I’m Dead (Bywater Books), was honored as a 2017 Lambda Literary Awards finalist. It is the first installment in the Charlie Mack Motown Mystery series. Head’s short story, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and her tribute to Washington, DC’s LACE Restaurant and Lounge, will be featured in the upcoming anthology: Happy Hours—Our Lives in the Gay Bars, (Flashpoint Publications). Head has communications degrees from Ohio University (M.A.), and Wayne State University (B.A.).