An Evening with Michael Lowenthal in conversation with William Johnson
About this Event
🎟 This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event! An RSVP grants general entry, but seating is not guaranteed, so please try and show up early. Please RSVP only if you intend to join us. Can't make the event?
About The Book
Growing up in places where his family had no past, and met mostly by silence from his Holocaust-refugee grandparents, Michael Lowenthal longed to be from somewhere. Then he realized he was gay and felt displaced from his own displaced family. Place Envy—his first book of essays after five acclaimed books of fiction—chronicles his quest for orientation in the world: as an agnostic Jew, as a queer traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth. Yearning for a queer lineage, he obsesses about an uncle who perished at Bergen-Belsen but then finds, in his grandmother’s German hometown, a more surprising legacy. He lives with a Pennsylvania Amish family; accompanies blind gay men on a Mexican cruise; plays jazz with Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist who claimed to hail from Saturn; and pursues a clarifying love affair in Brazil. Collectively, these essays recount Lowenthal’s many journeys of dislocation and relocation: to foreign countries and subcultures and to the riskiest shores of family and self.
About The Author
Michael Lowenthal is the author of the novels The Same Embrace, Avoidance, Charity Girl, and The Paternity Test, and of the short story collection Sex with Strangers. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Out, and many other publications. His stories have been widely anthologized.
About The Moderator
William Johnson is the Director of PEN America’s Florida office. A longtime steward in the writing community, Johnson was the editor and publisher of Mary Literary, a literary magazine committed to showcasing work of artistic integrity. He also co-produced Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, the first major anthology for queer poets of color in the United States. In 2021, Johnson was awarded The Publishing Triangle’s Leadership Award, which recognizes contributions to LGBTQ literature by those who are not primarily writers, such as editors, agents, librarians, and institutions.
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