Join poets Jendi Reiter and Steven Riel for a reading from their new books and a conversation about inhabiting different gender personae through art. Reiter’s third poetry collection, Made Man (Little Red Tree), explores female-to-male transition and gay masculine identity through the voices of unusual objects and fictional characters with some aspect that is constructed, technological, or hybrid. From a surrealist’s eggbeater discovering feminist consciousness, or a pastry box enforcing omertà, to the Nicene Creed as interpreted by Frankenstein, these startling life studies open up onto a broader consideration of humanity’s relationship with technology and the shadow side of male dominance of nature. Shapeshifting abounds in Edgemere, Riel’s second collection, as this pro-feminist gay poet marshals a parade of female personas that includes Senator Elizabeth Dole, Joan of Arc, and The Supremes. Riel’s poems zigzag across liminal spaces not just between male/female and human/inhuman, but between those fallen from AIDS and survivors who grieve them.

Copies of Jendi Reiter’s Made Man and Steven Riel’s Edgemere will be available for purchase at the event.

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.

If you can’t join us in person, watch the live-stream of the event on the Bureau’s YouTube channel.

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.

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 you can donate in advance on Eventbrite.

Jendi Reiter is the author of the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), the short story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press, 2018), and four poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Bullies in Love (Little Red Tree, 2015). Their awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Poetry, the New Letters Prize for Fiction, the Wag’s Revue Poetry Prize, the Bayou Magazine Editor’s Prize in Fiction, and two awards from the Poetry Society of America. Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction and was a finalist for the Book Excellence Awards and the Lascaux Prize for Fiction. They are the editor of WinningWriters.com, an online resource site with contests and markets for creative writers.

Steven Riel is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Fellow Odd Fellow (Trio House Press, 2014) and Edgemere (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021). His most recent chapbook Postcard from P-town was published as runner-up for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared in several anthologies and numerous periodicals, including The Minnesota Review and International Poetry Review. He currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Franco-American literary e-journal Résonance. Author photo: Jamison Wexler