BOOK LAUNCH – The Maidenheads

Join debut author Benny Peterson in conversation with Lydi Conklin for the launch of The Maidenheads, an electrifying queer coming of age story filled to the brim with yearning, music, and the complications of reuniting with your first love (who was also your queer awakening and also your first bandmate and, oh yeah, your first everything).

Jamie is bad at endings, which is why she's stuck at a dead-end Baltimore newspaper job, continuing to have break-up sex with her first-ever hetero partner, and haunted by the what-ifs of her ex-girlfriend Mari—a charismatic and brilliant musician—and their former band together, the Maidenheads. Since they (and their band) broke up a decade ago, Jamie hasn't been able to sing.

But, when an unexpected opportunity to perform in DC with Mari's successful new band arises, Jamie jumps at it. What begins as a return to music becomes a reckoning—with the weight of unfinished love, the voice she long buried, and her own complicated past. As Jamie channels more of her energy into the band, other threads in her life begin to fray, and she must make some urgent choices about her future: for what she wants and, ultimately, for what she hopes.

Utterly transportive, The Maidenheads perfectly captures the rush of your first love and live music, while also deftly touching on topics such as family, loss, reproductive rights, pregnancy, and identity.

*****

Benny B. Peterson (they/them) is a writer and editor based near Washington, DC. A contributing editor at Washingtonian magazine, they have also worked at Foreign Policy, the New Republic, and Street Sense, DC's street newspaper. They have written about culture, politics, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues for The New York Times, Washington Post, Elle, Slate, and The Atlantic, among other places, and received an MFA in fiction from Bennington.

Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Emory, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, Headlands, Loghaven, Lighthouse Works, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for The Believer, Lenny Letter, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They’ve served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and are now an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

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