New York City April 28

I'm going to be part of a reading of Lambda Literary Award finalists, which will be held at 7 pm at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, 208 West 13th Street in Manhattan. The readings will be short and sweet, which is actually a form I love a lot -- it works with the poet in me. Here's a list of the other readers (in the order that we're going to be reading):

K. Warnock - Best Lesbian Erotica
Aaron Krach - Half-Life
Will Fabro - Fresh Men
Alexis De Veaux - Warrior Poet
Morty Diamond - From the Inside Out
Amy King - Antidotes for an Alibi
Mark Wunderlich - Voluntary Servitude
Andrea Barnet - All Night Party
Susan Stinson - Venus of Chalk
Colm Toibin - The Master

I know that Alexis De Veaux and her biography of Audre Lorde is bound to be interesting, and the same for All Night Party, which is a history of the wild women of Greenwich Village in the early part of the century, including the ever popular Edna St. Vincent Millay. I've read Voluntary Servitude, a book of fierce and haunting poems by Mark Wunderlich, many of them inhabited by animals in rural settings, very tender and ferocious with snakes filling the trees, bees being smoked, calves being born, and a dangerously original eroticism -- I thought it was brilliant, and I'm looking forward to meeting the poet. If I can get it together, I'd like to read The Master by Colm Toibin before I go, too -- it's a novel about Henry James at a moment of failure for him, and one of the reviewers at Powells wrote:

Toibin's depiction of James is a nuanced, emotional portrait of an almost unknowable figure — the artist in a life more imagined than lived. Toibin's pacing and prose are exquisite; his novel is a graceful, thoughtful meditation on writing and philosophy, as well as an astute exercise in psychology. Its resonance has continued all year long.

This interests me because I love good novels about anything, but also because it feels relevant to what I'm trying to do with Jonathan Edwards in the new novel.

This reading is just two days before the Fat Girl Flea Market, at the very same spot. Needless to say, it would thrill me if any of my friends from NYC showed up.