Investigating Queer Boyhood
Originally from Savannah, GA, PERRY BRASS (moderator) has published 17 books, been a finalist 6 times for Lambda Literary Awards, a finalist for the prestigious Ferro-Grumley Fiction Award from the Ferro-GrumleyFoundation, has won 4 “Ippy” Awards from Independent Publisher, and appears in more than 30 anthologies of poetry, short fiction, essays, and critical studies. He has been involved in the lgbt movement since 1969, when he co-edited Come Out!, the world’s first gay liberation newspaper. In 1972, with two friends he started the Gay Men’s Health Project Clinic, the first clinic for gay men on the East Coast, still operating as New York’s Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. Currently a coordinator of the Rainbow Book Fair, his newest book is King of Angels, A Novel About the Genesis of Identity and Belief, a finalist for a Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay and Lesbian Fiction, 2013.

JIM ELLEDGE’s Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy: The Tragic Life of an Outsider Artist is a finalist for the 2013 Lambda Literary Award, as is his Who’s Yer Daddy? Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners which he co-edited with David Groff. Lethe Press published his H, a collection of prose poems, in 2012. He lives in Atlanta.

COLLIN KELLEY is the author of the novels Conquering Venus and Remain In Light, which have just been re-issued in new editions by Sibling Rivalry Press. Remain In Light was the runner-up for the 2013 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Fiction and a 2012 finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. His poetry collections include Better To Travel, Slow To Burn, After the Poison and Render (2013, Sibling Rivalry Press), chosen by the American Library Association for its 2014 Over the Rainbow Book List and named a Best Book of 2013 by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award, Deep South Festival of Writers Award, and Goodreads Poetry Award, Kelley’s poetry, essays and interviews have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies around the world. www.collinkelley.com

MICHAEL KIMMELL is the author or editor of more than twenty volumes, his books include Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity (1987), Men Confront Pornography (1990), The Politics of Manhood (1996), The Gender of Desire (2005) and The History of Men (2005). His documentary history, “Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States, 1776-1990” (Beacon, 1992), chronicled men who supported women’s equality since the founding of the country. His latest book is Angry White Men (Nation Books, 2013). He is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at SUNY, and Executive Director, Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities.

CHARLES RICE-GONZALEZ, born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx, is a writer, long-time community and LGBT activist, co-founder and Executive Director of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance and a Distinguished Lecturer at Hostos Community College – CUNY.  He received a B.A. in Communications from Adelphi University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College.  His debut novel, Chulito (Magnus 2011), has received awards and recognitions from American Library Association (ALA) and the National Book Critics Circle. He co-edited From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction (Tincture 2011) with Charlie Vazquez.  He is also an award-winning playwright and serves on the boards of the Bronx Council on the Arts and the National Association of Latino Art and Cultures.

Sappho and Whitman’s Children: Finding Our Own Line in Poetry
R. ERICA DOYLE was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents.  Her first book, proxy, was published by Belladonna Books in 2013 and is a winner of the 2014 Norma Faber first book award from the Poetry Society of America and well as being a 2013 Lambda Literary Award finalist.  Her work as appeared in Best American Poetry, Bloom and Sinister Wisdom, among others.  She lives in New York City, where she is an administrator in the NYC public schools and facilitates Tongues Afire:  a free creative writing workshop for queer women and trans and gender non-conforming people of color.

MICHAEL KLEIN (moderator) is a four-time Lambda Literary Award Finalist and his third book of poems is The Talking Day (Sibling Rivalry Press) has just been named a Lambda Finalist, making it number five. New work appears or is forthcoming in Little Star, Guernica, Poets & Writers, The Awl and Poetry magazine.  He reviews books for Los Angeles Review of Books and The Rumpus and teaches in the MFA Program at Goddard College and lives in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

ELEANOR LERMAN’s first book of poetry, Armed Love (Wesleyan University Press, 1973), was nominated for a National Book Award. She has since published several other award-winning collections of poetry—Come the Sweet By and By (University of Massachusetts Press, 1975); The Mystery of Meteors (Sarabande Books, 2001); Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds (Sarabande Books, 2005); and The Sensual World Re-Emerges (Sarabande Books, 2010), along with The Blonde on the Train (Mayapple Press, 2009) a collection of short stories. She was awarded the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Nation magazine for the year’s most outstanding book of poetry for Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds and received a 2007 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first novel, Janet Planet, was published by Mayapple Press in 2011. Her latest collection of poetry, Strange Life, was published by Mayapple in 2014. Her next novel, Radiomen, will be published by The Permanent Press in 2015.

ROBERT SIEK‘s poems have appeared in Court Green, Assaracus, The Nervous Breakdown and The Good Men Project.  In 2002, the New School published his chapbook, Clubbed Kid and his first full length collection, Purpose and Devil Piss was published in 2013 by Sibling Rivalry Press.

JASON ZUZGA‘s poems will be a book published in Saturnalia Books in 2016.  He is the Nonfiction/Other Editor of FENCE and has received residencies from the James Merrill House and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  His poems and essays have been published in numerous venues including the Paris Review, Maggy, Spork, Tin House and the Seneca Review.  He is currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.

The World of Glenway Wescott
JERRY ROSCO (moderator) is the author of the biography Glenway Wescott Personally and editor of two new Wescott works, A Heaven of Words: Last Journals and A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories—both recently nominated for Lambda Literary Awards. He knew Wescott in the writer’s late years and co-edited with Robert Phelps the earlier journals, Continual Lessons. Jerry started out as a cub reporter for Gannet Newspapers, with an Associated Press citation for investigative journalism, and his publishing career included 10 years with Mandate, Playguy, Torso and other Mavety magazines (which Glenway would have loved).

STEVEN HAAS, director of the George Platt Lynes Foundation, is a photographer, art historian, and film maker. His book, George Platt Lynes: The Male Nudes (Rizzoli, 2011), contains previously unpublished photographs from the archives of the Kinsey Institute. He is presently in production on a documentary about George Platt Lynes and his circle.

You Can Tell Just By Looking  Performance/Presentation
Ann Pellegrini is professor of performance studies and religious studies at New York University, where she also directs NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She has written extensively about religion, sexuality, and US public life. Her publications include Performance Anxieties and the coauthored book Love the Sin. You Can Tell Just By Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People is a Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Non Fiction.