Join authors Randi Triant and Ann Wadsworth on Friday, January 27th at 7 PM ET, for a reading and conversation about their latest novels, What We Give, What We Take and Libretto, two stories of complicated relationships and grief and loss around HIV/AIDS.

Randi Triant’s latest LGBTQ+ novel, What We Give, What We Take, was selected for Parade Magazine’s “20 Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2022 We Love.” Foreword Reviews said, “At once tender, cruel, sensitive, and raw, What We Give, What We Take is a searing novel in which wounded people make hard decisions in order to survive.” In 1967, Fay Stonewell, a water tank escape artist in Florida, leaves for Vietnam to join the Amazing Humans—a jerry-rigged carnival there to entertain the troops—abandoning her disabled teenage son, Dickie, to the care of an abusive boyfriend. Decades later, Dickie is forty, living in Massachusetts with a man who’s dying of AIDS, and doing everything he can to escape his past.

In Ann Wadsworth’s Libretto, freelance journalist Allyn Crosbie, whose reporting concentrates on musical theater and opera production, arrives in central Italy in pursuit of a quick story about a new production that’s in danger of falling apart. In the ancient city of Perugia she becomes entangled with the lives of Elaine Bishop, a brilliant but troubled stage director, and Vincent Norrie, a composer who’s battling a life-threatening illness. Ally joins them — and a colorful cast of local characters — in their efforts to head off the opera’s librettist, who’s attempting to sabotage Elaine’s premiere. Although Allyn falls for Elaine, the novel “excels at depicting the complicated love between Ally and Vincent, two queer characters whose intimacy is vivid and authentic.” The book is “a leisurely, moving tale of intimacy and art, with a lovingly drawn Italian setting.” (Quotes from the starred Kirkus Review)

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 or on Venmo @bgsqd.

Randi Triant is the author of three LGBTQ novels, What We Give, What We Take, A New Life, and The Treehouse. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review, Art & Understanding, Christopher Street, and two anthologies of writing about HIV/AIDS: Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A & U and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora. She has taught writing at Boston College and Emerson College.

Ann Wadsworth is the author of two novels, Libretto and Light, Coming Back. Light, Coming Back was short-listed for the Ferro-Grumley Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award. German and French translations are available with the title Mrs. Medina.  Her short stories have appeared in several publications, including Christopher Street and Blithe House Quarterly. She has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and the recipient of a Wellspring Grant from the Boston Athenaeum. She lives in Boston.