StoryFest 2024 Keynote Conversation: Roxane Gay and Oliver Radclyffe

New York Times best-selling author and activist Roxane Gay headlines StoryFest 2024 in conversation with writer Oliver Radclyffe, whose first memoir, Frighten the Horses, publishes this fall under Gay's publishing imprint, Roxane Gay Books.

Now in its seventh year, StoryFest is The Westport Library’s annual celebration of reading, writing, ideas, and community as well as the largest literary festival in Connecticut and will be held September 20-22.

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Frighten the Horses is a textured, sharply written memoir about coming of age in the fourth decade of one’s life and embracing one’s truest self in a world that demands gender fit in neat boxes.

“I often think that the entire purpose of a human life is to see if we can somehow get FREE — if we can escape from the rules, expectations, and limitations of our families and our cultures in order to live an entirely different existence than the one that was assigned to us at birth. Frighten the Horses is the inspiring true story of one man’s extraordinary journey of escape from the wrong marriage, the wrong gender, the wrong life, in order to become who he was always meant to be. This book is as sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation. I am deeply grateful to have read it, and my hope is that Oliver’s story will free many others, as well.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls

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Roxane Gay is a professor, editor, social commentator, and New York Times best-selling author. Her 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.

Oliver Radclyffe is part of the new wave of transgender writers unafraid to address the complex nuances of transition, examining the places where gender identity, sexual orientation, feminist allegiance, social class, and family history overlap. His work has appeared in The New York Times and Electric Literature, and he recently published Adult Human Male, a monograph with Unbound Edition Press on the trans experience under the cisgender gaze. He currently lives on the Connecticut coast, where he is raising his four children.

Host or Publisher The Westport Library