About this Event
Join us for Laughs and Lit: Queer Storytelling and Comedy at .
This special evening brings together an incredible lineup of writers, artists, and storytellers for a celebration of queer storytelling, humor, and community. Expect a lively, thoughtful, and unforgettable night of literary conversation, comic brilliance, and creative connection.
Hosts:
Charlie Jane Anders
Participants:
Kim Shuck
Gwendolyn Paradice
Ajuan Mance
Rebecca Hall
María Mínguez Arias
Ginny Berson
Come gather with us for stories, laughter, and queer literary magic in one of San Francisco’s beloved book spaces.
About Charlie Jane Anders
Charlie Jane Anders is the award-winning, nationally bestselling author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster. Her other books include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night, and the young adult Unstoppable trilogy. She also published a book about how to use creative writing to get through tough times called Never Say You Can't Survive. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Conjunctions, ZYZZYVA, the Paris Review, McSweeney's, Esquire and the Catamaran Literary Reader. She’s currently writing the comic book Star Trek: Zero Point for IDW. Read more here.
About Baruch Porras-Hernandez
Baruch Porras-Hernandez is a writer, performer, organizer, professional MC/Host, curator, stand up comedian, and the author of the chapbooks “I Miss You, Delicate” and “Lovers of the Deep Fried Circle” both with Sibling Rivalry Press. He had the honor of touring with the legendary Sister Spit Queer poetry tour in 2019, is a is a two-time winner of Literary Death Match, a regular host of literary shows for KQED, and was named a Writer to Watch in 2016 by 7×7 Magazine. His poetry can be found with Write Bloody Publishing, The Tusk, Foglifter, Assaracus and many more. He has been an artist in residence at The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, and Playwriting. He’s been featured in shows with The Rumpus, Writers with Drinks, has performed several times with Radar Productions, LitQuake, and Quiet Lightning. His solo show “Love in the Time of Piñatas” got a clapping man from the SF Chronicle and was performed to sold-out houses at Epic Party Theatre in December of 2019. He is the head organizer of ¿Donde Esta Mi Gente? a Latinx literary performance series, he is an immigrant originally from Mexico, and is currently the lead artist in a multidisciplinary project that will create new Queer Latino Superheroes with MACLA, which stands for Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana in San Jose. He lives in San Francisco. Read more here.
About Kim Shuck
Kim Shuck embraces the fool and jester qualities of being a modern poet and artist. She is a devotee of San Francisco, whose hills she wanders nearly always on foot. Her maternal grandparents met at the Polish Hall on Shotwell and she spent many hours with her mother and grandmother wandering the Mission St. Miracle Mile, taking books out of the Mission Branch library and watching aquarium fish on the ground floor of what used to be Hale's. She firmly believes in carrying a bubble wand, keys, pen and notebook and cats cradle string at all times.
Shuck is widely published in journals, anthologies and a couple of solo books. She enjoys volunteering in SFUSD elementary school classrooms to share her loves of origami, poetry and basket making... in other words, math of various kinds. In 2019 Shuck was awarded an inaugural National Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and a PEN Oakland Censorship Award. Read more here.
About Gwendolyn Paradice
Gwendolyn Paradice is a queer, disabled, Cherokee-Caucasian writer of fiction and nonfiction. A 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, they're also the author of the Hudson Prize winning short story collection More Enduring for Having Been Broken (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) as well as a chapbook co-authored with poet Kara Dorris, Carnival Bound (or, Please Unwrap Me) (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Their creative work has been nominated for Pushcarts, Best American Essays, and Best of the Net, and their short stories and essays can be found in Booth, Zone 3, Crab Orchard Review, Tin House Online, The Journal of America Folklore, and others. An Assistant Professor of English at Murray State University, they retain a PhD from The University of Missouri, an MFA from Bennington College, and MA and BA degrees from the University of North Texas, north of Dallas, where they were born and raised. Read more here.
About Ajuan Mance
Ajuan Mance is a Professor of African American literature at Mills College in Oakland, California. A lifelong artist and writer, Ajuan has participated in solo and group exhibitions as well as comic and zine fests, from the Bay Area to Brooklyn. In her art, illustration, and comics, Ajuan uses humor and bright colors to explore race, gender, power, and the people and places in which they intersect. Her work has appeared in a number of digital and print media outlets, including, most recently, The Women’s Review of Books, Blavity.com, BET.com, Transition Magazine, Buzzfeed.com, KQED.org, the San Francisco Chronicle, NYTimes.com, KPIX News, and Publisher’s Weekly. Read more here.
About Rebecca Hall
Rebecca Hall, JD PhD is an independent scholar, activist, and educator. Her paternal grandparents were born enslaved and she is the daughter of Harry Haywood. Dr. Hall writes and publishes on the history of race, gender, law, and resistance as well as articles on climate justice and intersectional feminist theory. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College, Berkeley Law, and University of Santa Cruz.
Her most recent book, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (Simon & Schuster, 2021) has won multiple awards, and was a finalist for the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards and the Pen America Open Book Award. Wake has been listed as a Best Book of 2021 by NPR and The Washington Post, Forbes, Ms. Magazine, and has been released in eight languages. She has been a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute (2022-23) The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Stanford Humanities Center 2023-24). Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships. Read more here.
About María Mínguez Arias
María Mínguez Arias is a fiction writer, essayist, occasional editor, and translator. She is the author of * Nombrar el cuerpo* (Editorial Egales/Spain and El BeiSmAn PrESs/USA, 2022), chosen in Spain as one of the best Queer literature of 2022 by the magazine *Qué Leer*, and included among Vanity Fair Spain's recommendations for Pride Month 2025;and of the novel *Patricia sigue aquí* (Editorial Egales, 2018), winner of an ILBA award in the United States. Her stories and essays appear in anthologies and magazines in the United States, Mexico, and Spain. She was co-editor of the anthology *#NiLocasNiSolas: narrativa escrita por mujeres en Estados Unidos* (El BeiSmAn PrESs, 2023), and editor (2021-2024) of the Letras USA section of *El BeiSmAn* , a magazine of Spanish-language literature in the United States. The author draws on her identity as an immigrant, queer woman, mother, and Spanish-language writer in the U.S. to explore themes such as digital, familial, and historical memory, motherhood, language, the body, and the everyday experiences and resilience of life lived on the margins. Mínguez Arias works as director of operations and interim co-director at the feminist publishing house Aunt Lute Books in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her partner and children. Read more here.
About Ginny Berson
Ginny Berson is a long-time political activist driven by a longing for justice. She was a member of The Furies-- a radical lesbian feminist separatist collective in Washington, D.C. that lived and worked collectively to develop lesbian feminist political thought and philosophy. The group produced a newspaper, The Furies, that had a significant impact on women’s groups in the U.S. Ginny was a contributor and member of the editorial staff.
Ginny and her partner, the musician Meg Christian, were the initial driving force behind the creation of Olivia Records, the national women’s record company. Olivia produced records by Meg, Cris Williamson, BeBe K’Roche, Linda Tillery, Teresa Trull, Mary Watkins, a poetry album by Pat Parker and Judy Grahn, and Lesbian Concentrate—a “lesbianthology” in response to a rising wave of homophobia. Read more here.
About Medicine for Nightmares
Medicine for Nightmares is a BIPOC-owned bookstore and gallery in San Francisco's Mission District, known for its curated selection of books, art, and community events, focusing on literature as medicine against oppressive systems. It serves as a community hub, offering new and used books, with a special emphasis on BIPOC, political, and alternative titles, alongside art and vinyl. The name comes from a Sun-Ra song, reflecting its mission to counter the "nightmare of white power structures" through literature. Read more here.
About Aunt Lute
Aunt Lute Books is an intersectional, feminist press dedicated to publishing literature by those who have been traditionally underrepresented in or excluded by the literary canon. Core to Aunt Lute’s mission is the belief that the written word is critical to understanding and relating to each other as humans. Through the sharing of stories, we strengthen ties across cultures and experiences, and at the same time honor the hurt, loss, and harm incurred through structural power imbalances, prejudiced and gendered systems, and ancestral trauma. We uplift these voices in order to build a more just future. Read more here.
About Sistah Scifi
Started in 2019 by Isis Asare, Sistah Scifi is the first Back-owned book store focused on science fiction and fantasy in the US, as validated by the American Booksellers Association. Located primarily in cyberspace, Sistah Scifi launched three Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machines at Chapter510, located at 546 9th St, Oakland, CA 94607, and Northwest African American Museum and Distant Worlds Coffee in Seattle, WA, in 2022. Read more here.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Medicine for Nightmares, 3036 24th Street, San Francisco, United States
USD 0.00
