Leather and Lust – Come One, Come All To An Evening Of Literature with Sassafras Lowrey, Laura Antoniou, D.L. King, and Nairne Holtz.

Sassafras Lowrey is a teenage runaway who grew up to become the 2013 winner of the Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award. Hir books—Lost Boi, A Little Queermas Carol, Roving Pack, Kicked Out and Leather Ever After—have been honored by organizations ranging from the National Leather Association to the American Library Association. Sassafras lives and writes in Brooklyn with hir partner, and their menagerie of dogs and cats. Learn more at www.SassafrasLowrey.com

Proud member of the Middle Aged Guard, Laura Antoniou has been writing erotica for over twenty-five years. Best known for her Marketplace series of erotic novels about a realistic slave training society. The 6th book, The Inheritor, was launched with an enormously successful Kickstarter featuring a limited leather-bound edition. The second volume of fan fiction set in the Marketplace world is due out in 2018. She has also edited and appeared in many anthologies, including Best Lesbian Erotica 2015, and is the author of Rainbow Award winning comedy kinky mystery, The Killer Wore Leather. Her website is LAntoniou.com; follow her on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

D. L. King (dlkingerotica.blogspot.com) has a literary-minded cat who begs for her 9:00 treats from about 8pm, on. However, while other cats like to sit on keyboards and sleaze their way in front of your monitor, Batgirl knows how important the work of writing and editing is and refuses to bother her during those times. (No, really, it’s true.) She must be a very patient cat as D. L. is almost always at the computer. D. L. King is the editor of fourteen anthologies, including a Lambda Literary Award Winner, The Harder She Comes: Butch/Femme Erotica, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Where the Girls Are: Urban Lesbian Erotica and five Independent Publisher Medalists, (two gold and three silver) Carnal Machines: Steampunk Erotica, The Harder She Comes: Butch/Femme Erotica, Under Her Thumb: Erotic Stories of Female Domination, The Big Book of Domination: Erotic Fantasies and Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year, Volume 1. Her short stories have been published in close to a hundred anthologies, including six volumes of Best Lesbian Erotica, as well as titles such as Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica, Girl Crazy: Coming Out Erotica, and Girl Fever: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex for Lesbians. D. L. King is also the editor of She Who Must Be Obeyed: Femme Dominant Lesbian Erotica. She has a couple of novels and a few novellas in print, as well as a collection of 21 of her own favorite femdom short stories.

Nairne Holtz began her writing career in the early 90s with the creation of a pansexual queer porn zine, Pornorama, that generated reviews and sales from around the world. A straight couple who ran a fetish group offered to back her financially and elevate Pornorama to magazine status. She pooh-poohed this offer she didn’t think was terribly practical: “Thanks, that’s sweet, but I’m going to library school.”

Today she manages a law library and is the author of several works of fiction. The Skin Beneath (Insomniac, 2007), was shortlisted for Quebec’s McAuslan Prize (rather respectable) and won the Alice B. Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction (she hadn’t heard of this award either until she received an email informing her she had won it). This One’s Going to Last Forever (Insomniac, 2009), was a Lambda Literary Award finalist (terribly thrilling). Her new novel, Femme Confidential, will be out in the fall of 2017.