Join local author Elisabeth Nonas and local publisher Nancy Bereano for an hour long discussion regarding their professional literary lives and how both have overlapped and diverged. Elisabeth will be reading from her most recently published novel, Grace Period. A Q&A will follow.
Nancy K. Bereano is the former editor and publisher of the groundbreaking, award-winning lesbian and feminist press, Firebrand Books (1985-2000). Some of the best known, innovative, and well-respected lesbian authors from that period—Dorothy Allison, Alison Bechdel, Cheryl Clarke, Leslie Feinberg, Jewelle Gomez, and Audre Lorde—made their literary home at Firebrand. Nancy has been a grassroots political activist for most of her adult life and was instrumental in securing the passage of LGBT antidiscrimination legislation for both the City of Ithaca and Tompkins County. She served for fifteen years as a community representative on the City of Ithaca’s Workforce Diversity Committee, and participated in and was trained as a facilitator for the Talking Circles on Race and Racism. She has lived in Ithaca for over fifty years and has been active in both local and national social justice issues throughout that time.
Elisabeth Nonas is the published author of three novels (Naiad Press) and coauthor with Simon LeVay of one nonfiction book (MIT Press) as well as numerous short stories and essays. She taught screenwriting and writing for emerging media at Ithaca College for twenty-five years and condensed her pedagogy into the self-published Story Workout: Exercises to Help You Connect with the Stories You Want to Tell. Each of her novels have been about how lesbians form community and family: making their lives, dealing with commitment, long-term relationships, whether or not to have children, and how they love. Her first novel was published when she was in her mid-30s. Now, almost forty years later, she clearly has different concerns—among them retirement, aging, grief, academic life—and they are what sparked her latest novel Grace Period as well as its sequel-in-progress Away with Words.
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