In this Pride edition of Upcoming/Up & Coming, Jason and Brett talk to Justinian Huang (The Emperor and the Endless Palace) about living life romantically, KT Hoffman (The Prospects) about how anyone can play baseball, and Myriam Lacroix (How it Works Out) about a twist on autofiction.

Born to immigrants in Monterey Park, California, Justinian Huang studied English at Pomona College and screenwriting at the University of Oxford. He is now based in Los Angeles with Swagger, a Shanghainese rescue dog he adopted during his five years living in China. The Emperor and the Endless Palace is his debut novel.

KT Hoffman is originally from Beaverton, Oregon and currently lives in Brooklyn. He received his bachelor’s degree in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University. If he isn’t writing about trans hope and gay kissing, he’s probably white-knuckling his way through the ninth inning of a Seattle Mariners game. The Prospects is his debut novel.

Myriam Lacroix was born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father, and currently lives in Vancouver. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing.

**BOOKS!**
Check out the list of books discussed on each episode on our Bookshop page:
https://bookshop.org/shop/gaysreading | By purchasing books through this Bookshop link, you can support both Gays Reading and an independent bookstore of your choice!

Join our Patreon for exclusive bonus content!

Purchase your Gays Reading podcast Merch!

Follow us on Instagram
@gaysreading | @bretts.book.stack | @jasonblitman

What are you reading?
Send us an email or a voice memo at gaysreading@gmail.com

Jason and Brett kick off PRIDE 2024 with some incredible queer authors! They talk to Carvell Wallace (Another Word for Love) about the key to your ability to fight for what's right, R.O. Kwon (Exhibit) about art and how taking a choreography workshop got her in the body of her characters, and Byron Lane (Big Gay Wedding) about why he thinks he'd thrive in prison.

Carvell Wallace grew up between Southwestern PA, Washington DC, and Los Angeles. He attended Tisch School for the Arts and worked as a stage actor before spending fifteen years in direct service youth non-profits. He has covered arts, entertainment, music, culture, race, sports, and parenting for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Slate, GQ, Pitchfork, MTV News and others. As a podcast host, he has been nominated for a Peabody and won a Kaleidoscope Award and was the Slate parenting advice columnist. He is the co-author of the New York Times best-selling basketball memoir The Sixth Man with Andre Iguodala. He lives in Oakland and has two adult children, a comfortable couch, and a lot of plants.

R. O. Kwon is the author of the nationally bestselling novel The Incendiaries, which was named a best book of the year by more than forty publications and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award. With Garth Greenwell, Kwon coedited the bestselling Kink, a New York Times Notable Book. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.

Byron Lane is the author of A Star Is Bored, hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “wildly funny and irreverent.” He’s a playwright, screenwriter, Emmy Award–winning journalist, and former assistant to actress Carrie Fisher. He’s originally from New Orleans and lives in Palm Springs, California, with his husband, author Steven Rowley, and their rescue dogs, Raindrop and Shirley.

**BOOKS!**
Check out the list of books discussed on each episode on our Bookshop page:
https://bookshop.org/shop/gaysreading | By purchasing books through this Bookshop link, you can support both Gays Reading and an independent bookstore of your choice!

Join our Patreon for exclusive bonus content!

Purchase your Gays Reading podcast Merch!

Follow us on Instagram
@gaysreading | @bretts.book.stack | @jasonblitman

What are you reading?
Send us an email or a voice memo at gaysreading@gmail.com

In the fourth installment of their debut novelists series UPCOMING / UP & COMING, Jason and Brett talk to three new writers about their recently and soon-to-be released books. Zoë Bossiere (Cactus Country, May 21) talks about navigating identity growing up in a trailer park; Alan Murrin (The Coast Road, June 4) shares how short stories transformed into a novel; and Essie Chambers (Swift River, June 4) talks about how ancestral inheritance shaped her book, and also learns about the cootie shot.

Zoë Bossiere (they/she) is writer from Tucson, Arizona. They are the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. as well as the coeditor of two anthologies: The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020) and The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State UP, 2023). Bossiere's debut, Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir, chronicles their experiences growing up as a trans boy in a Tucson, Arizona trailer park.

Alan Murrin is an Irish writer based in Berlin. His short story, “The Wake,” won the 2021 Bournemouth Writing Prize and was shortlisted for short story of the year at the Irish Book Awards. The Coast Road was shortlisted for the PFD Queer Fiction prize. Murrin is also the recipient of an Irish Arts Council Agility Award and an Arts Council Literature Bursary. He is a graduate of the prose fiction masters at the University of East Anglia, and writes for the Irish Times and the Times Literary Supplement, as well as Art Review and e-flux.

Essie Chambers earned her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Vermont Studio Center, and Baldwin for the Arts. A former film and television executive, she was a producer on the documentary Descendant, which was released by the Obamas’ Higher Ground production company and Netflix in 2022. Swift River is her debut novel.

**BOOKS!**
Check out the list of books discussed on each episode on our Bookshop page:
https://bookshop.org/shop/gaysreading | By purchasing books through this Bookshop link, you can support both Gays Reading and an independent bookstore of your choice!

Join our Patreon for exclusive bonus content!

Purchase your Gays Reading podcast Merch!

Follow us on Instagram
@gaysreading | @bretts.book.stack | @jasonblitman

What are you reading?
Send us an email or a voice memo at gaysreading@gmail.com