John G. McCullough Free Library and Bennington Queer Connect's Sapphic Story Hour are partnering to host Stephanie Andrea Allen on March 15 @ 7:00 PM, via Zoom.
Register Here: https://tinyurl.com/y6pwdsph
The first 5 people to register for this event will receive a copy of Dr. Allen's book, How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions.
Stephanie Andrea Allen, Ph.D. is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, creative writer, small press publisher, and Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her research centers Black lesbian cultural histories and Black feminisms through various expressions, including literature, film, and other print and visual media. Her current book project, We Must Document Ourselves Now: Black Lesbian Cultural Legacies and the Politics of Self-Representation, examines how Black lesbian literature and film reflects the material realities of Black lesbian lived experiences, as well as how it responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that contribute to the invisibility of Black lesbians in popular and literary culture.
Dr. Allen is also Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at BLF Press, and co-editor of Serendipity Literary Magazine. Her creative work can be found in various online and print publications, including Mom Egg Review, Star*Line, Inkwell Black, Big Echo: Critical Science Fiction Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, and in her two short story collections, A Failure to Communicate and How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions.
At this online event, Dr. Allen will read from her recent book, How to Dispatch a Human.
In this daring collection of speculative fiction, Stephanie Andrea Allen attends to the lives of Black women, mostly lesbian or queer, all keenly aware of the forces seeking to consume them.
A Black lesbian working the gig economy runs into a trio of motorized scooters and helps them escape from Earth. An enchanted sleep mask gives a woman the gift of slumber, but what will it cost her? A suburban housewife is framed for murder by her homophobic neighbor. And in the follow up to "Luna 6000," a young woman investigates her mother's untimely death, and learns the truth about her family.
How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions is an unapologetic, often humorous, foray into the quotidian magic that envelops Black women's lives. The eleven stories in this collection are filled with characters who will entice and delight readers as they traverse the worlds around them. With a mix of fabulism, near future, and speculative fictions, Allen reminds us in exquisitely nuanced prose that the fantastical can be found amongst the ordinary.