Matthew Clark Davison in conversation with Michael Nava

Matthew Clark Davison will be joined by Michael Nava to discuss his debut novel, Doubting Thomas. Thomas McGurrin is a fourth-grade teacher and openly gay man at a private primary school serving Portland, Oregon’s wealthy progressive elite when he’s falsely accused of inappropriately touching a male student. The accusation comes just as Thomas is thrust back into the center of his unusual family by his younger brother’s battle with cancer. Although cleared of the accusation, Thomas is forced to resign from a job he loves during a potentially life-changing family drama. 

Davison’s novel explores the discrepancy between the progressive ideals and persistent negative stereotypes among the privileged regarding social status, race, and sexual orientation and the impact of that discrepancy on friendships and family relations. 

Armistead Maupin writes, “An electrifying debut. Doubting Thomas is one of those novels where you return to passages, again and again, to see exactly how the author pulled off such an ingenious sleight-of-hand. Matthew Clark Davison is a force to be reckoned with.”  

Doubting Thomas can be purchased from our event co-sponsor, Fabulosa Books. 

Bios 

Matthew Clark Davison is the author of Doubting Thomas (Amble Press ’21). He is creator and teacher of The Lab :: Writing Classes with MCD, a non-academic school started in 2007 in a friend’s living room. The textbook version of The Lab, co-authored by bestselling writer Alice LaPlante, will be published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2022. His prose has been recently anthologized in Empty The Pews (Epiphany Publishing) and 580-Split; and published in or on LitHub, Lambda Literary, The Advocate, Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, The Rumpus, Foglifter, Exquisite Pandemic, and others. Matthew earned a BA and MFA in Creative Writing from SFSU, where he now teaches full-time in the BA/MA/MFA departments. 

Michael Nava is the author of an acclaimed series of eight novels featuring gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios who The New Yorker, called “a detective unlike any previous protagonist in American noir.” The New York Times Book Review has called Nava “one of our best” writers. He is the recipient of seven Lambda Literary Awards in the gay mystery category and the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in LGBT Literature. His most recent Rios novel is Lies With Man, was published in April by Amble Press, an LGBTQ press and imprint of Bywater Books, of which he is also managing editor.