Incite: Queer Writers Read – January

Stacy Brewster is a fiction writer, poet, and screenwriter. Born in Los Angeles and raised both there and in the San Francisco Bay Area, he studied filmmaking in New York and has since worked in television, independent film, advertising, publishing, politics, and public service. His fiction and poetry have appeared in New South, The Madison Review, Gertrude, Plenitude, and The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, among numerous others. He was awarded the 2019 Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in Drama for his teleplay Gargoyles & Dandelions, an as-yet-unproduced one-hour queer noir series set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. He works as a copy editor in Portland, Oregon, and lives there with his partner (now husband) of nearly two decades, Jonathan, and their dog Lucinda.  What We Pick Up is his first book.

Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen is a graduate of Columbia University, where she earned degrees in Creative Writing and Russian Literature. She presently studies Slavic Literature at the University of Michigan, and lives with hundreds of books and one neglected houseplant. She is a winner of the 2021 Sappho Prize from Palette Poetry, and her work has appeared in Columbia Review, Poet Lore and the anthology New York’s Best Emerging Poets.  

Joanna Hoffman (www.joannahoffman.com) is a spoken word poet and teaching artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She competed on 5 National Poetry Slam teams, ranked 4th at the 2012 Women of the World Poetry Slam and was a champion of Capturing Fire, an international LGBTQ poetry competition. Her full-length book of poetry, Running for Trap Doors (Sibling Rivalry Press) was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and featured in the American Library Association's list of recommended LGBT reading. In 2015, she was named an Obama White House Champion of Change for LGBT advocacy through art. Her work has appeared in Upworthy, Buzzfeed, Winter Tangerine, decomP, PANK, The Offing, Union Station Magazine, The Legendary, Sinister Wisdom and in the Write Bloody Publishing anthologies We Will be Shelter and Multiverse.