It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 8: Robert Bruegmann!
Robert Bruegmann joins us to share his first fiction book: Roman Ivory – A Novel. We discuss men loving men in the 19th century. It leads to a discussion of coded signals, generational discover, the author’s expertise in art & architecture, and the backdrop of murder.
Bio:
Robert Bruegmann is an historian of architecture, landscape and the built environment. He received his BA from Principia College in 1970 and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. In 1977 he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History, Architecture and Urban Planning. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia College of the Arts, MIT and Columbia University. He is author or editor of numerous award-winning non-fiction books and articles and a novel, Roman Ivory.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 7: Lewis DeSimone!
Lewis DeSimone joins us for the first time with his book: Exit Wounds. We discuss middle age, the disappearance of gay touchstones in culture, and jury duty as a lens for seeing life.
Bio:
Lewis DeSimone has supported his writing habit through a long career in marketing and academic publishing. His debut novel, Chemistry, investigated the impact of mental illness on a gay couple. In subsequent works, The Heart’s History and Channeling Morgan, he tackled subjects as diverse as AIDS, drag, cults, and the celebrity closet. At the core of all of his work is the hard and necessary struggle for self-knowledge and acceptance. As his latest novel, Exit Wounds, demonstrates, that effort doesn’t end at some magical point of “maturity,” particularly in turbulent periods like the present, when cultural shifts happen so quickly we don’t have time to fully grasp what we’re losing in the process.
A frequent panelist at the Saints and Sinners Literary Conference, Lewis has published fiction and nonfiction in the Advocate, Christopher Street, Chelsea Station, and a range of other journals and literary anthologies.
Lewis grew up in Boston and earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard. He also has a master’s in creative writing from the University of California, Davis. After spending 25 years in San Francisco, he retired to Minneapolis, where he lives with his husband.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 5: Rob Osler!
Rob Osler returns to share the first book in his Harriet Morrow Investigates series: The Case of the Missing Maid. We discuss the parallels between the Progressive Era (1890-1920) and current events, writing an exemplary and queer woman in a historic setting, and the unfolding of the series.
Bio:
Rob Osler writes traditional mysteries featuring LGBTQ+ main characters. Believing that relatability is as important as representation, he strives to showcase our shared humanity across individual identities. Rob’s just-released historical novel THE CASE OF THE MISSING MAID is a USA Today Bestseller, earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and is an Amazon Editors Pick for Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense. His other work has been a finalist for the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, Lefty, and Macavity Awards, a CrimeReads Best of the Year, and a winner of the Mystery Writers of America Robert L. Fish Award. After living in Boise, Chicago, and Seattle, Rob resides in California with his husband and a tall gray cat.
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March 8, 2024
It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 10 Interview – Rob Osler
Rob Osler returns to share his latest Hayden & Friends Mystery, Cirque du Slay! We discuss the importance of characters living their authentic lives and the growth of the “quozy” genre!
Rob is a member of Mystery Writers of America, the Authors’ Guild, Sisters in Crime, and Queer Crime Writers. He is a graduate in philosophy from the University of Puget Sound and earned a master’s degree in business from the University of Washington’s Foster School.
After many years living in Chicago and Seattle, he resides in California with his long-time partner and a tall, gray cat.
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May 12, 2023
It gives us great pleasure to present Season 8, Episode 20: Rob Osler + Our Review of And Then We Danced!
Rob Osler brings his energy to the show to discuss his “quozy” mystery, Devil’s Chew Toy. He shares his 2-minute pitch poem and we discuss what it means to be queer in the cozy genre. Then Baz and Vance discuss the foreign film And Then We Danced, followed by who won their weeks!
Bio:
Rob writes traditional mysteries featuring LGBTQ+ main characters. His novel Devil’s Chew Toy was a 2023 Left Coast Crime Finalist for Best Debut Mystery and an Agatha Awards Finalist for Best First Novel and named a 2022 Year’s Best by Crime Reads, BOLO Books, PopSugar, and Book Riot. The sequel to Devil’s Chew Toy, titled Cirque du Slay, comes out March 9, 2024. His first publication, Analogue, (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine), won the 2022 Mystery Writers of America Robert L Fish Award for best short story by a debut author as part of the Edgar Awards. Forthcoming works include Miss Direction in Ellery Queen’s September/October edition, and Red Shoes in the Brutal and Strange, an anthology based on Elvis Costello songs from Down & Out Books, Jan 2024. Also on the horizon is The Case of the Missing Maid, book one in a new historical series featuring a queer female detective in Chicago in the Progressive Era from Kensington Books.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 4: MW Lindberg!
MW Lindberg shares their book: Black Hole Recess. We discuss writing children for adults, as well as children facing violence, non-binary characters in fiction, and finding one’s self in a story.
Bio:
MW LINDBERG (he/they) is a queer author, husband, gamer, tea-drinker, and support person to an anxious chihuahua. He is the author of unusual novellas and other short works. He spent a few decades in the theater as an actor, director, writer, and teacher and has since pivoted to fiction. He lives in Queens, NYC.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 3: Scott Hightower!
Scott Hightower shares his book: Imperative to Spare. We discuss oral storytelling and poetry, touching on topics of grief journeys and rebuilding ones life after loss, and expanding your internal self by expanding your world.
Bio:
Scott Hightower is the author of four books of poetry in the US. He has published two bilingual collections in Spain. He is also the editor of the bi-lingual (English/Spanish) poetry anthology 2012 Women Rowing: Mujeres A Los Remos, Mantis Editores, Guadalajara, Mexico.
Hightower’s awards include a Hayden Carruth Book Award and a Barnstone Translation Prize. Originally from Texas, he has itinerantly sojourned in India, Italy, Spain, and now lives in Manhattan where he teaches at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 2: Zachary Pace!
Zachary Pace shares their book: I Sing to Use the Waiting. We discuss how the turning points in the careers of several women singers informed and shaped the author’s life through topics like identity and how artists code genders to tell our stories.
Bio:
Zachary Pace is a writer and editor who lives in New York City, whose first book is I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am, and whose writing has been published in the Baffler, BOMB, Bookforum, Boston Review, Frieze magazine, Interview magazine, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the PEN Poetry Series, the Yale Review, and elsewhere.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 1: J.M. Frey!
J.M. Frey helps us ring in the New Year by sharing her recent novel: Time & Tide. We discuss time travel and time slip stories, the Regency/Georgian era, and lesbian/bi romances, all while keeping an eye on causality of changing the first lesbian kiss in literature.
Bio:
J.M. is an author, screenwriter, and lapsed academic. With an MA in Communications and Culture, she’s appeared in podcasts, documentaries, and on radio and television to discuss all things geeky through the lens of academia. She also has an addiction to scarves, Doctor Who, and tea, which may or may not all be related. Her life’s ambition is to have stepped foot on every continent (only 3 left!)
J.M.’s also a professionally trained actor who takes absolute delight in weird stories, over the top performances, and quirky characters. She’s played everything from Marmee to the Red Queen, Jane Eyre to Annie, and dozens of strange creatures and earnest heroines as a voice actor.
Her debut novel Triptych was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, won the San Francisco Book Festival award for SF/F, was nominated for a 2011 CBC Bookie, was named one of The Advocate’s Best Overlooked Books of 2011, and garnered both a starred review and a place among the Best Books of 2011 from Publishers Weekly.
Her sophomore novel, an epic-length feminist meta-fantasy titled The Untold Tale, (book one of the Accidental Turn Series), debuted December 2015, and was followed up by The Forgotten Tale in 2016 and The Silenced Tale in December 2017. The Skylark’s Song, book one of The Skylark’s Saga, a steampunk action novel about a girl vigilante and her mysterious rocketpack, soared into bookstores in 2018, and was followed up by The Skylark’s Sacrifice in September 2019. The Skylark’s Saga was signed to a shopping agreement for an animation series in 2018. All six of these novels were reprinted under Frey’s personal backlist imprint Here There Be in late 2023.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 9, Episode 50: Davis Summers!
Davis Summers joins us to share his debut novel: Eating & Praying. Our discussion covers seeing the world through a millennial lens, growth and grief, being young and queer trying making sense of the narcissistic internet age, and all the biting comedy that ensues.
Bio:
Davis Summers is an author and artist living in Los Angeles, California. He was born and raised in Poplar Bluff, Missouri (the homeland of both Gone Girl and Designing Women, fittingly). Davis pursued acting and journalism at New York University where he obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2019. After moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the film industry, Davis made the pivot to the tech industry where he still works to this day in addition to his writing. Eating & Praying is his debut novel which has been described as “endlessly relatable” by New York Times Bestselling Author Casey Wilson as well as “a beautiful debut novel” by Emmy-nominated actor Michael Urie.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 9, Episode 48: Dale Corvino!
Dale Corvino returns to share his memoir: Afterlife of a Kept Boy. We discuss the nuance of being a kept boy and how one untangles their emotions and learns to live after that relationship ends. We also touch on using different writing styles to highlight new phases of life, de-stigmatizing sex work, and finding closure.
Bio:
Recipient of the 2023 C&R Press Nonfiction Award, and a 2021 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow, Dale Corvino found his voice at the underground literary salon “Dean Johnson’s Reading for Filth.” In 2018, he won the Gertrude Press Fiction contest, judged by Whiting Award recipient Brontez Purnell. Recent nonfiction includes a profile of Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel for the Gay & Lesbian Review, an essay on queer longing in the digital era for Matt Keegan’s 1996, and a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society. BONDS & BOUNDARIES, his debut short story collection, was released in 2023 from Rebel Satori Press.
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May 3, 2024
It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 17 Interview – Dale Corvino
Dale Corvino joins us to share his book Bonds and Boundaries! We discuss sex work, having beacons on our paths, estrangement, and human connection in this digital age.
A 2021 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow in nonfiction, Dale Corvino’s essays have appeared in Salon, the Rumpus, and the Gay & Lesbian Review. Bonds & Boundaries, his debut collection of short stories, was released in 2023 by Rebel Satori Press. His memoir of sex work, Kept Boy in the Afterlife, won the 2023 Nonfiction Prize from C&R Press and will be released in September 2024.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 9, Episode 47: Gerard Cabrera!
Gerard Cabrera joins us to share his novel: Homo Novus. We discuss Latinx characters, HIV/AIDS, religion, the complexities of abuse, and what characters have to face to move forward. We also touch on the importance of community as a writer, and The Publishing Triangle as a resource.
Bio:
Gerard Cabrera earned a degree in English and American Literature at Brandeis University, his Masters’s Degree in Public Health from Hunter College, and his law degree from Northeastern University School of Law. He served on the board of Gay Community News, was a member of the theater troupe United Fruit Company, and competed in the 1994 Gay Games.
Over the years, Gerard has worked in non-profits, universities, and in government. Active in New York’s queer communities, he has practiced public interest law his entire legal career. Gerard is a Massarican from Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthplace of Dr. Seuss, basketball, and the first American dictionary. He lives and works in New York City.
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It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 8: Robert Bruegmann!
