CONTAGIOUS EXCHANGES, the monthly reading series hosted and curated by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, continues with Los Angeles-based writer and author of the recent “dreamoir,” BRUJA, Wendy C. Ortiz, joined by novelist and disability advocate Jennifer Natalya Fink.

Both writers will read from their recent work, followed by an onstage conversation with Mattilda.

Free to the public. Information on Hugo House and accessibility can be found on our FAQ page: http://www.hugohouse.org/about/faq/

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ABOUT THE WRITERS

Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir, Hollywood Notebook, and the dreamoir Bruja. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hazlitt, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among other places. She lives in Los Angeles.

Jennifer Natalya Fink is the author of four published novels, including the Dana Award-winning and Pulitzer-nominated The Mikvah Queen. She is a professor of creative writing at Georgetown University, and she founded The Gorilla Press, a nonprofit aimed at promoting youth literacy through bookmaking. Her forthcoming novel Bhopal Dance was recently shortlisted for both the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Award and the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 Press, as well as the Clarissa Dallowy Fiction Prize from the A Room of Our Own Foundation and the Willow Books Literature Award.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is most recently the author of a memoir, The End of San Francisco, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and the editor of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book.

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ABOUT THE SERIES

Held on the first Wednesday of every month in the Hugo House Cabaret at 7:00 pm, CONTAGIOUS EXCHANGES is hosted and curated by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. The monthly series features two dynamic writers bridging genre, style, sensibility, and all the markers of identity in queer lives. Cross-pollinating spoken word with literary fiction, poetic experimentation with creative nonfiction, hybrid work with narrative prose, CONTAGIOUS EXCHANGES seeks to explode boundaries so that critical engagement can thrive.

“…more than just a promising reading series, what Bernstein Sycamore is doing with CONTAGIOUS EXCHANGES is claiming a space to discuss queer issues in literature,” writes Paul Constant in The Seattle Weekly. “[The series] is proof that there’s more to be said, written, and discussed about the state of queer writing in America…”