Out of Cupid's Mouth
On Tuesday, February 24, the coordinators of The Rainbow Book Fair and the Pat Parker/Vito Russo Center Library hosted a reading and reception event at the LGBT Community Center in anticipation of the upcoming fair. Themed "Out of Cupid’s Mouth: Warm Love in a Cold Month," the event featured several powerful authors and poets reading select pieces of their work, including IPPY award-winning authors Perry Brass and Kay Williams. Brass, who also coordinates RBF, served as the evening’s moderator and seamlessly ushered the audience through the event’s diverse voices and topics.
FEATURED AUTHORS
Philip F. Clark
KT Grant
Debra Hyde
Ashley Inguanta
Ansley Moon
Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes
Robert Siek
Kay Williams
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Feature
The Seventh Annual Rainbow Book Fair
A Preview of the Upcoming Event
The upcoming Rainbow Book Fair is both America’s oldest LGBT book fair and the largest LGBT book event in the country. Now in its 7th year, the fair is a crucial hub for LGBT literary culture, bringing together the industry’s best and brightest LGBT writers as well as publishers, editors, agents, media, and readers. Since its founding, the event has quickly grown, culminating in last year’s 1,500 attendees. Hundreds of industry professionals and over 1,000 readers will again flock to Manhattan’s Holiday Inn on Saturday, April 18th for a day of exhibitors, readings, and panels.
Although the fair’s focus is LGBT literature, the featured books are a wonderfully diverse array with something for readers of every genre. Attendees are of numerous age groups, gender identities, and ethnicities, and readers are encouraged to come whether they are familiar with LGBT literature and culture or not. As Julie Enszer argued in the Huffington Post, the role of the Rainbow Book Fair has become increasingly important as other avenues of connection between LGBT authors and their readers have closed. It has become a place for book discovery as well as a center for LGBT literary discourse. Julie stated:
“The past 20 years have been difficult for small literary publishers. Independent LGBT bookstores, once a vibrant community with stores in most major U.S. urban areas, have diminished in numbers, size and reach over the past 20 years. Many long-standing community book institutions, like A Different Light in New York and San Francisco and Lambda Rising in Washington, D.C., closed as a part of overall consolidation in bookstores when Internet technologies disrupted book-selling…Once readers could be found through our LGBT bookstores and at conferences, today, publishers often find readers online, but there is nothing more wonderful than the face-to-face interactions among readers, writers and publishers. The Rainbow Book Fair will be filled with these interactions.”
This year’s fair is set to even top last year’s success; the popular Poetry Salon will be presented by Regie Cabico and Nathaniel Siegel and will feature nonstop poetry reading between noon and 6:00 from over 40 participating poets (full list here). There will be two panels: “In the Beginning,” LGBT Jewish Writers on Culture, Heritage, and Queer Family Ties, with Jason Schneiderman, Michael Broder, Martha Shelley, Donna Minkowitz, and IPPY award-winner D.L. King; and The Persistence of Memory: LGBT Memoir and Biography, with David Margolick, Rob Smith, and Jamie Brickhouse.
For more about the Rainbow Book Fair, visit the links below.
RAINBOW BOOK FAIR WEBSITE
EXHIBITOR INFORMATION
BECOME A FRIEND OF THE RAINBOW BOOK FAIR
Lauren White graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in History and English. She is serving as Assistant Editor and Awards Account Manager at Independent Publisher. Please email her at lwhite [at] bookpublishing.com with any questions and comments.