BESPOKE: It’s ostentatious October! Join us for the resurrection of our most garish garments and frighteningly fashionable attire as Thursday, October 11 the Bureau features Sarah Schulman, Heather Lynn Johnson, and Yanyi at Bespoke, a bimonthly queer series where featured readers dress fun, fancy, or flirtatious, while supporting the Bureau and resisting fascism. This sinfully sartorial series presents fashionable femmes, dapper dykes, chic twinks, trendy trans* folk, & frothy FTMs. Featured writers are encouraged to suit up or dress down : readers’ choice.
 

Open mic readers (2 minutes each): whose name shall be drawn from the rainbow top hat this month? General attendees: which incredible edibles from Dylan’s Candy Bar will find their way to the insatiate maws of our deviant demimonde?
 

Your hosts are the trio Christina “CQ” Quintana (writer/ playwright/ dyke about town), Tim Murphy (longtime LGBTQ journalist, activist and author of the novel Christodora), Jerome Ellison Murphy (poet, critic and NYU Creative Writing Program administrator) who invite you to turn out in your Thursday best (dressing up is welcome & encouraged, not mandatory) every other month for drinks and chat before & after our reading.

Sarah Schulman is the 2018 recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, for her renown as a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, and AIDS historian. Among her novels are The Cosmopolitans, The Child, and Rat Bohemia (winner of the 1996 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction). Her works of nonfiction include Conflict Is Not Abuse (winner of last year’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction), The Gentrification of the Mind, and Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences. Schulman’s nineteenth book, the novel Maggie Terry, will be published in September 2018 by the Feminist Press. She serves on a number of advisory boards including Jewish Voice for Peace, Research on the Israeli/American Alliance, and Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute. Schulman has received Guggenheim in playwriting, a Fulbright in Judaic studies, and two American Library Association Stonewall Awards. A fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, she is distinguished professor of the humanities at CUNY/College of Staten Island.

Heather Lynn Johnson is a poet, photographer and a performance artist living in Brooklyn. She is the author of The Survival Guide For Queer Black Youth (Inpatient Press, 2017) and the 2017 literary fellow for the Queer|Art|Mentorship program. Johnson’s work is characterized by its lyricism and cultural critique. Her formal approach to the narrative, whether visual or poetic, is distinguished by her willingness to lay bare her own existence. Johnson received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA from Columbia College Chicago both in Photography.

Yanyi is a poet and critic. In 2018, he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, awarded by Carl Phillips, for his first book, The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press 2019). Currently, he is an associate editor at Foundry and an MFA candidate at New York University. He formerly served as Director of Technology and Design at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, senior editor at Nat. Brut, and curatorial assistant at The Poetry Project. He is the recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers Workshop and Poets House. Find his recent work in VIDA, Reservoir, and Memorious.