Perfectly Queer East Bay Reading “Summer Reading List”

Whether it’s a staycation at Lake Merritt or a trip to the Mediterranean, you’ll need a good book–or four. Come hear visiting author Nick White and local writers Cathy Arellano, Wilfredo Pascual, and Kate Raphael read from their newest books at Perfectly Queer East Bay’s “Summer Reading List” Wednesday, July 25, 7pm at Laurel Book Store, 1423 Broadway in Oakland. Free admission, free refreshments, and Queerly summer door prizes.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS & THEIR BOOKS:
The broken-hearted lesbian love poems in Cathy Arellano’s I LOVE MY WOMEN, SOMETIMES THEY LOVE ME are suitable for anyone who has loved, been loved, or been left. MY WOMEN was released in Fall 2017 from Kórima Press. In 2016, Kórima also published SALVATION ON MISSION STREET, Arellano’s family memoir in poems and stories set in San Francisco from the 1960s to the 2000s. SALVATION won the 2017 Golden Crown Literary Society’s Debut Author Award. Arellano teaches in the English Department at American River College where she will teach the college’s first Latina/o/x Literature course in Fall 2018. Sign up!

Wilfredo Pascual is a Pushcart-nominated essayist who grew up in the Philippines where his essays have won several national awards and state recognition from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. He lived in Thailand before moving to the Bay Area in 2005. He is the author of KILOMETER ZERO, a collection of personal essays about finding your rightful place. Winner of the 2015 Curt Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and runner-up for the 2016 Steinberg Essay Prize, his work has been listed as Notable in the 2016 Best American Essays. He lives in the Mission with his husband Jack.

Kate Raphael is a radical queer feminist activist and writer. She’s the author of two published mysteries, both set in Palestine and featuring a Palestinian policewoman and a Jewish-American dyke. The second in the series, MURDER UNDER THE FIG TREE, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and won a Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award for multicultural fiction. She produces and hosts Women’s Magazine on KPFA radio and makes her living as a law firm word processor.

A native of Mississippi, Nick White is the author of the novel HOW TO SURVIVE A SUMMER (2017) and the short-story collection SWEET AND LOW (2018). He’ll be reading from SWEET AND LOW. He is an Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in a variety of places, including The Kenyon Review, Guernica, The Hopkins Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, and Lit Hub.