Please join us for the official book launch for Julia Guez’s THE CERTAIN BODY (out this fall from Four Way Books). We hope to see you in-person or online that night; the event will be live-streamed. Very special guests include Francisco Márquez, t’ai freedom ford, Jenny Johnson and Mark Bibbins. You can buy books directly from the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division. Reception at seven. Reading at 7:30. Book signing at 8:30.

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 on the Bureau’s YouTube channel

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.

Safety protocol

In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:

If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.

Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Copies of The Certain Body and other books by our readers will be available for purchase at the event.

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

Mark Bibbins is the author of four poetry collections, most recently 13th Balloon (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. His first book, Sky Lounge (Graywolf Press, 2003), received a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at The New School and Columbia University, and in NYU’s Writers in Florence program.

t’ai freedom ford is the author of two poetry collections, how to get over from Red Hen Press and more black from Augury Books, winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in the city of New York. The Certain Body is her second collection of poetry, written while she was recovering from COVID in the spring of 2020.

For her poetry, fiction and translations, Guez has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation as well as a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For the last decade, Guez has worked with Teach For America, New York; she’s currently the senior managing director of design and implementation there. She teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers.

You can find more of her work online at www.juliaguez.net and if you are so inclined, can buy all of her books here at the Bureau. She would be happy to sign them for you(!)

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017).  Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship, and a NEA Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop. She lives in Pittsburgh.

Francisco Márquez is a poet from Maracaibo, Venezuela, born in Miami, Florida. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, his work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, The Yale Review, and The Best American Poetry anthology, among other publications. He has received support from the Tin House Writer’s Workshop, The Poetry Project, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was a 2019-2020 Poetry Fellow. He is Assistant Web Editor at Poets & Writers and lives in Brooklyn, New York.