In-Store: Annie Liontas: Sex with a Brain Injury w/ Sabrina Imbler

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the featured book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/qhhaTwgc6bQ
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

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For readers of Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, and Melissa Febos’s Girlhood, a powerful and deeply personal memoir in essays that sheds light on the silent epidemic of head trauma.
Annie Liontas suffered multiple concussions in her thirties. In Sex with a Brain Injury, she writes about what it means to be one of the “walking wounded,” facing her fear, her rage, her physical suffering, and the effects of head trauma on her marriage and other relationships. Forced to reckon with her own queer mother’s battle with addiction, Liontas finds echoes in their pain. Liontas weaves history, philosophy, and personal accounts to interrogate and expand representations of mental health, ability, and disability—particularly in relation to women and the LGBT community. She uncovers the surprising legacy of brain injury, examining its role in culture, the criminal justice system, and through historical figures like Henry VIII and Harriet Tubman. Encountering Liontas’s sharp, affecting prose, the reader can imagine this kind of pain, and having to claw one’s way back to a new normal. The hidden gift of injury, Liontas writes, is the ability to connect with others.
For the millions of people who have suffered from concussions and for those who have endeavored to support loved ones through the painful and often baffling experience of head trauma, this astonishing and compassionate narrative offers insight and hope in equal measure.

Annie Liontas is the genderqueer author of the memoir Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery, which was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and selected as SELF Magazine’s Book of the Month. Their debut novel, Let Me Explain You, was selected as New York Times Editors Choice. They co-edited the anthology A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors, and their work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Gay Magazine, NPR, Electric Literature, BOMB, Lithub, The Believer, Guernica, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, they are a professor of writing at George Washington University. Annie has served as a mentor for Pen City’s incarcerated writers and helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. They co-host the literary podcast LitFriends and live in Philadelphia.

Sabrina Imbler is a staff writer at the worker-owned website Defector, where they cover creatures and the natural world. Their book How Far the Light Reaches won a 2022 Los Angeles Book Prize in science and technology, and their chapbook Dyke (geology) was selected by the National Book Foundation's science & literature program. Sabrina lives in Brooklyn with their partner, a school of fish, and two cats, Sesame and Melon.

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