Whodunnit? Mystery Writers
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| Spend the evening with mystery writers and their creations: newly published author Sean Reynolds introduces Chan Parker, a butch African American ex-numbers runner in 60’s Chicago; Michael Nava brings us Henry Rios, a gay Latino criminal defense lawyer in LA in the 80’s; Katherine V. Forrest created the first Lesbian homicide detective, Kate Delafield, in 80’s LA and Steven Saylor’s Gordianus the Finder has dealt with cases in Ancient Rome and Egypt during the time of Cleopatra.
Listen to spirited readings from these authors, be part of a Q&A and discussion moderated by Jewelle Gomez and hear readings from their new work. Reception/Book sale and signing follows the event!
Katherine V. Forrest Katherine V. Forrest’s 15 works of fiction are in translation worldwide and include her eight-volume Kate Delafield mystery series and the lesbian classics Curious Wine, An Emergence of Green, and Daughters of a Coral Dawn, the first novel in her award-winning lesbian-feminist utopian trilogy. Her stories, articles and reviews have appeared in national and international publications. She has conducted seminars and taught classes in the craft of fiction, most recently at Stanford University. Honors and awards include four Lambda Literary Awards, the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle, the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation, and a profile in USA Today. Senior editor at the storied Naiad Press for ten years, she is currently supervising editor at Spinsters Ink and editor-at-large for Bella Books. During her almost three decades of free lance editing she has worked with many published authors, and has also edited or co-edited numerous anthologies. She lives with her partner of almost two decades and their two personality-plus cats.
Michael Nava Michael Nava is a third-generation Californian of Mexican descent. He was born and raised in Sacramento and was the first member of his family to go to college, graduating with honors from the Colorado College in 1976. He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1981. He began his legal career as a prosecutor in the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office where he tried upwards of fifty criminal matters, gaining invaluable experience as a trial lawyer that he later used in his acclaimed series of crime novels featuring a gay Latino criminal defense lawyer named Henry Rios. The first novel, The Little Death was published in 1986, and was followed by six others: Goldenboy (1988), The Hidden Law (1990), How Town (1992), The Death of Friends (1994), The Burning Plain (1998) and the final installment, Rag and Bone (2000). Reviewing Rag and Bone, Marilyn Stasio at the New York Times called him “one of our best.” The Rios novels earned Nava a total of six Lambda Literary Awards and in 2001 the Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in GLBT Literature as well as a fellowship from the California Arts Council and an honorary degree as a Doctor of Humane Arts from his alma mater, the Colorado College. His books have been taught at the college and university level and are discussed in a number of critical and scholarly works including Contemporary Gay Novelists, Emmanuel Nelson, ed. (Greenwood Press, 1993) and Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicano/a Identity, Ralph Rodriguez (University of Texas Press, 2005). Nava continues to practice law, as a judicial staff attorney at the California Supreme Court in San Francisco. For the past decade he has been at work on a long historical novel entitled The Children of Eve set in Mexico and an Arizona border town between 1910 and 1917 based, in part, loosely on the early life Ramon Novarro, the gay silent film star.
Sean Reynolds Sean Reynolds (b. 1950) and spent the first half of her adult life in Chicago, IL and so far, the second half in San Francisco, CA.. She is an African American Lesbian author, who recently published her first novel, Dying For A Change, (Suspect Thoughts Press -Dec., 2009. Dying is a noir mystery, featuring protagonists Chan Parker and Henrietta Wild Cherry, two snoops who solve a murder. Dying For A Change is set in pre-Stonewall Chicago in 1965. Sean is the Co-Founder of the MEDEA PROJECT: Theater For Incarcerated Women.She has worked in jails and prisons in the United States and in South Africa. She graduated from San Francisco State University with a Masters Degree in Social Work. Go to www.booksbyseanreynolds.com for more information about Dying For A Change and Sean Reynolds.
Steven Saylor Steven Saylor was born in 1956 in Goldthwaite, Texas, a small town of churches, barbershops, and fishing holes, not unlike the village of Mayberry in the classic TV series. Among the formative experiences of his childhood was seeing the movie CLEOPATRA with Elizabeth Taylor at the local drive-in movie theater, and seeing his first jockstrap, worn by an older boy in the changing room of the municipal swimming pool. Steven credits these seminal events with inspiring his two later careers, first writing gay erotica under the penname Aaron Travis and later writing historical fiction about ancient Rome. The Aaron Travis erotica flourished in the 1980s and ’90s, after Steven moved to San Francisco and found work in the gay press. Aaron Travis is officially retired, but some of his stories have never gone out of print, including “Blue Light,” which Susie Bright calls “perhaps the most fantastic supernatural erotic thriller ever written.” Steven’s historical mysteries about Gordianus, sleuth of ancient Rome, have been published in 21 languages. EMPIRE, a sequel to ROMA, his family saga about the first thousand years of Rome, will be published in September, and includes his take on all the emperors from Augustus to Hadrian. His web site is www.stevensaylor.com (with a page for Aaron Travis at stevensaylor.com/AaronTravis). |
