Tuesday, June 19 at 7:00pm

In honor of Pride Week 2012, Melissa Febos (_Whip Smart_) curates a lineup of queer women writers to share shameless stories of sex, love, rebellion, redemption, and pride. Including prose, poetry, and film by Laurie Weeks, Kelli Dunham, Ariel Levy, Pamela Sneed, Katrina Del Mar, Shelly Oria & Rachel Simon.

Katrina del Mar is a New York-based artist, commercial photographer, and award winning film director of the Girl Gang Trilogy: Gang Girls 2000, Surf Gang, and Hell on Wheels: Gang Girls Forever. A solo gallery show called Gangs of New York was presented in June 2010, at Wrong Weather Gallery in Porto Portugal. As a freelance producer & editor, her client list includes Stella Zotis (Project Runway/Magical Elves); Footlocker, Conde Nast (Sapient Nitro). As a freelance photographer, her client list includes Sony Music, Island/Def Jam, Polygram, V2 Records, Time Out New York, People Magazine, Alternative Press, Mademoiselle, and the NYPost. As an artist, Katrina has shown her work at Deitch Projects, The Museum for Contemporary Art (CAPC) in Bordeaux, France, Wrong Weather Gallery in Porto Portugal, American Fine Arts Company, Binz 39 in Switzerland, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, the Miami Light Project, P.S. 122 in New York City, FabLab in Berlin, and the University of Cardiff in Wales.

Kelli Dunham is a ex-nun, genderqueerious stand-up nerd comic, one of _Velvet _Park Magazine’s 25 Significant Queer Women of 2011 and author of four books of humorous non-fiction, including two children’s books being used by Sonlight conservative home schooling association in their science curriculum. Her two comedy CDs “I am NOT a 12 Year Old Boy” and “Almost Pretty” are in regular rotation on Sirius Satellite Radio’s Rawdog Station and she has been seen on Showtime and the Discovery Channel.

Melissa Febos is the author of Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press, 2010), a critically acclaimed memoir about her years as a professional dominatrix that Kirkus Reviews said, “expertly captures grace within depravity.” Her work has appeared in Glamour, Salon, Dissent, The Southeast Review, The New York Times, Bitch Magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, among many other places, and she has been profiled in venues ranging from the cover of the _New York _Post to NPR’s Fresh Air. A 2010 & 2011 MacDowell Colony fellow, she has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, The New School, and NYU, and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. She lives in Brooklyn, and is currently at work on a novel and a screenplay.

Ariel Levy is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has profiled the intersex South African runner Caster Semenya, the former prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, and the lesbian separatist Lamar Van Dyke. She teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and was a Contributing Editor at New York magazine for twelve years. Her essay “The Lesbian Bride’s Handbook” was anthologized in The Best American Essays of 2010, and she is the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs.

Shelly Oria was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Israel. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Quarterly West, and fivechapters among numerous other places, and won the 2008 Indiana Review Fiction Prize among other awards. Shelly curates the series Sweet! Actors Reading Writers in the East Village and teaches fiction at Gotham Writers’ Workshop and Pratt Institute as well as privately.

Rachel M. Simon is the author of the poetry collection Theory of Orange (Pavement Saw Press) and a chapbook, Marginal Road (Hollyridge Press). She teaches writing, gender studies, and film courses at Marymount Manhattan College at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, SUNY Purchase College, Pace University and Poets House. She is working on a full-length collection of sports poems.

Pamela Sneed is a New York–based poet and actress. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out, Bomb, VIBE, and on the cover of New York Magazine. She is author of “Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery,” published by Henry Holt in April 1998 and KONG & other works published by Vintage Entity Press 2009. She has performed original works for sold out houses at Lincoln Center, P.S. 122, Ex-Teresa in Mexico City, The ICA London, The CCA in Glasgow Scotland, The Green Room in Manchester England, and BAM cafe. She has headlined the New Work Now festival at Joe’s Pub/Public Theater. She is part time theater faculty at Sarah Lawrence and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Speech, Communication and Theater at Long Island University, a visiting professor in the Core Seminar department. Her work is included in Essence Magazine and The 100 Best African American Poems edited by Nikki Giovanni.

Laurie Weeks is a writer and performer based in New York City. Her fiction and essays have been published throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, including in _Semiotext(e)’s The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian _Reading, Dave Eggers’s The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, and 2010’s Zipper Mouth. She was a screenwriter on Boys Don’t Cry. Weeks has taught at The New School in New York City and in 1996 was awarded a fiction fellowship by the New York Foundation for the Arts. She holds a Master of Arts in Performance Studies from New York University.