Jennifer Finney Boylan with Roxane Gay: Cleavage | LIVE from NYPL

Boylan talks to Roxane Gay about her latest memoir, an exploration of a life lived in two genders. For event details and more, visit www.nypl.org/e...
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In 2003 Jennifer Finney Boylan published She’s Not There, which became the first bestselling work by a transgender American and established Boylan as a go-to source for public conversation about the impact of gender on our lives. More than two decades later, her new memoir, Cleavage, returns with older and wiser eyes to examine the joys and the struggles of being transgender. In prose that is heartwrenching and hilarious, Boylan considers how the experiences of trans people might have changed from when she came out in 2000 to the present era of blowback and fear. The book is a humane and compassionate antidote to a moment that often finds discussions of trans lives and issues being distorted and abused for political aims.
Boylan speaks with bestselling author Roxane Gay about her hope for a future in which we all have the freedom to live joyfully as men, as women, and in the space between us.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of nineteen books, including Mad Honey, coauthored with Jodi Picoult. Her memoir, She’s Not There, was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. Since 2014, she has been the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University; she is also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College and the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She is the President of PEN America, and from 2011 to 2018 she was a member of the Board of Directors of GLAAD, including four years as national cochair. In 2022-23 she was a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She graduated from Wesleyan University and Johns Hopkins, and she holds doctorates honoris causa from Sarah Lawrence College, the New School, and Wesleyan University. For many years she was a contributing opinion writer for the opinion section of The New York Times. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Literary Hub, Down East, and many other publications. She lives in Maine and New York with her wife, Deirdre. They have two children: a daughter, Zai, and a son, Sean.
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity and once had a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.
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