How to Get Banned: An LGBTQ Author Panel

The demand for queer books has grown significantly in the past two years. According to NPD Group, in 2022, LGBTQ fiction book year-over-year sales increased by 39%. While the growing demand creates more opportunities, authors of LGBTQ literature continue to navigate a discriminating publishing environment.

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum invites you to discover how LGBTQ authors overcome various obstacles to getting their works published, and how to fight book bans. Joining author and Folio board trustee John Treat on the panel are author Felice Picano, author and poet Julene Tripp Weaver and Cuban American writer Patrick Milian. Enjoy a lively discussion and readings from each author's favorite LGBTQ banned book, followed by a wine reception with the authors.

Julene Tripp Weaver‘s truth be bold is a powerful, readable, nearly impossible-to-put-down, boundary-crossing coming-out collection. Weaver writes authentically about difficult but important things. She’s a hawk for truth; her unflinching gaze guides us through a work of frustration, love, sadness, survival, death, and compassion. “Inside desire lies/the truth of blood–/longing to live a full life, a natural death.” 

Patrick Milian is a queer, Cuban American writer and teacher based in Seattle, Washington. Milian holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington. He teaches writing and literature at Green River College. He is the author of The Unquiet Country, forthcoming from Entre Ríos Books, and the chapbook Pornographies, from Greying Ghost. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Gulf Coast, Mid-American Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. His musical collaborations have been performed by Northwest Art Song and Line Upon Line Percussion.

He has been the recipient of the Joff Hanauer Fellowship from the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the David A. Robertson Dissertation Fellowship, the Richard J. Dunn Teaching Award, and a Pushcart Prize nomination.

Felice Picano is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and plays. His work has been translated into many languages and several of his titles have been national and international bestsellers. He is considered a founder of modern gay literature along with the other members of the Violet Quill. Picano also began and operated the SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York for fifteen years. His first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he’s been nominated for and/or won dozens of literary awards. Picano teaches at Antioch College, Los Angeles.

Seattle author and long time Folio member John Whittier Treat is professor emeritus in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He is the author of Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb and the novel The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House.