Join Jennifer Savran Kelly, author of ENDPAPERS, and Margot Douaihy, author of SCORCHED GRACE, for a joint reading and conversation. The event will consist of a reading, a conversation between Jennifer and Margot, a Q&A, and book signing.

About ENDPAPERS: It’s 2003, and artist Dawn Levit is stuck. A bookbinder who works in conservation at the Met, she spends her free time scouting the city’s street art, hoping something might spark inspiration. Instead, everything looks like a dead end. And wherever she turns, her gender identity clashes with the rest of her life. Her relationship is falling apart as her boyfriend Lukas increasingly seems to be attracted to Dawn only when she’s at her most masculine. Meanwhile at work, Dawn has to present as female, even on days when that isn’t true. Then, one day at work, Dawn finds something hidden behind the endpaper of an old book: the torn-off cover of a midcentury lesbian pulp novel. On the front is an illustration of a woman looking into a handheld mirror and seeing a man’s face. And on the back is a love letter. Dawn latches onto the coincidence, becoming obsessed with tracking down the note’s author, trying to understand how to live in a world that doesn’t see her as she truly is. 

About SCORCHED GRACE: Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun, puts her amateur sleuthing skills to the test in this “unique and confident” debut crime novel. Scorched Grace is the inaugural title from Gillian Flynn Books

Copies of Endpapers and Scorched Grace are available to purchase at the Bureau and on our online store: 

Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming at YouTube.com/@bgsqd

Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.

All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.

We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd.

Jennifer Savran Kelly (she/they) lives in Ithaca, NY, where she writes, binds books, and works as a production editor at Cornell University Press. ENDPAPERS is her debut novel. In 2018 it won a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. In 2019 it was selected as a finalist for the SFWP Literary Awards program and for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Her short fiction has appeared in Potomac Review, Black Warrior Review, Green Mountains Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere.

Margot Douaihy is a Lebanese American originally from Scranton, PA, now living in Northampton, MA. She is the author of the poetry collections Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, Scranton Lace, and Girls Like You (Clemson University Press). She is a founding member of the Creative Writing Studies Organization and an active member of Sisters in Crime and the Radius of Arab American Writers. A recipient of the Mass Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowship, she was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, Aesthetica Magazine’s Creative Writing Award, and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation’s Hemingway Shorts. Her writing has been featured in Colorado Review; Diode Editions; The Florida Review; North American Review; PBS NewsHour; and elsewhere. Margot teaches Creative Writing at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, NH, where she also serves as the editor of the Northern New England Review. As a co-editor of the Elements in Crime Narrative Series with Cambridge University Press, she strives to reshape crime writing scholarship, with a focus on the contemporary, the future, inclusivity, and decoloniality.