Fall for the Book Festival - Diversity Authors

As part of George Mason University's annual Fall for the Book literary festival, the Office of Diversity has co-sponsored six authors to speak at the festival from September 23-27.

What began as a two-day literary event in 1999, organized by George Mason University and the City of Fairfax, Fall for the Book has expanded into a week-long, multiple-venue, regional festival that brings together people of all ages and interests.

Several authors with a GLBT perspective will be speaking.

Further information on these authors is below. See Fall for the Book for more information, including maps/directions to the speaking events.

9/24 4:30pm Dewberry Hall, Johnson Center - G. Winston James is a Jamaican-born poet, short fiction writer, essayist, and editor. He is the author of the poetry collections The Damaged Good and the Lambda Literary Award-nominated Lyric: Poems Along a Broken Road. A former executive director of Other Countries, James is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink: A Writers Festival for GLBT People of African Descent. James is co-editor of the historic anthologies Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black Gay/Lesbian Identity and Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Writing.

9/24 6:30pm Gold Room, Johnson Center - Dr. Sheppard Kominars is the author of Write for Life: Healing Mind, Body, and Spirit Through Journal Writing, as well as two earlier books on recovery: Accepting Ourselves and Others: A Journey into Recovery from Addictive and Compulsive Behaviors for Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals and Accepting Ourselves, The Twelve-Step Journey of Recovery from Addiction for Gay Men & Lesbians, the latter nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in non-fiction. A cancer survivor himself, Kominars has worked over the past twenty-five years in counseling and consulting, conducting workshops at the University of California at San Francisco, Stanford Complementary Care Center, Kaiser Permenente, the Center of the Desert, and other senior residences and centers. For more information, visit writeforlifeccp.com.

9/25 1:30pm Johnson Center Cinema - Jessica Valenti is the executive editor of feministing.com and the author of Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters. She is the editor of Beijing Betrayed, a global monitoring report on women's progress worldwide, and a contributor to We Don't Need Another Wave and Single State of the Union, and her writing has appeared in Ms., Salon, The Guardian (UK), Bitch, Alternet, The Scholar & Feminist, and Guernica. Valenti has worked with organizations such as NARAL Pro-Choice America, Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), Planned Parenthood, and the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), and she is a co-founder of the REAL hot 100, a campaign to highlight the important work that young women are doing across the country. In April 2007, she was named one of ELLE magazine's IntELLEgentsia. For more information, visit www.feministing.com.

9/25 7:00pm Gold Room Johnson Center - Mariana Romo-Carmona is the author of the novel Living at Night and the collection Speaking Like An Immigrant. Born in Santiago, Chile, she emigrated to the U.S. in the 1960s. She produced the first lesbian and gay bilingual radio program in the late 1970s, co-founded Latina lesbian groups in Boston and NYC, and joined international networks in South America. She was also one of the early members of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She is the co-editor of Cuentos: Stories by Latinas and the editor of Conversaciones: Relatos por padres y madres de hijas lesbianas y hijos gay. In addition to her books, her writing has appeared in The World in Us: Lesbian & Gay Poetry of the New Wave, A Woman Like That, Companeras: Latina Lesbians, and in other anthologies and periodicals in both English and Spanish.

9/27 4:30pm Grand Tier, third floor, Center for the Arts - Mark Doty is the award-winning author of seven poetry collections, most recently School of the Arts, and four memoirs, including his newly published Dog Years. His poetry collection Atlantis received the Ambassador Book Award, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award, and My Alexandria, chosen by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, in addition to being named a National Book Award finalist. An earlier memoir, Heaven's Coast, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Doty has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Whiting foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

9/27 6:00pm Harris Theater - Rita Mae Brown is the bestselling author of more than three dozen books, including novels, poetry collections, memoir and even a cookbook. Her first milestone novel, 1973's landmark bestseller Rubyfruit Jungle, details the coming of age of a young lesbian in mid-20th-century America. Brown is the co-author (with her cat) of the Sneaky Pie Brown mystery series; the series latest entry is this year's Puss N' Cahoots. She is also the author of a more recent mystery series, set around a Virginia fox-hunting club; the latest of these books, The Tell-Tale Horse, will be published during Fall for the Book.