Casey Plett, Hazel Jane Plante

media release:  A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Casey Plett and Hazel Jane Plante on their book tour for Any Other City and A Safe Girl to Love!

This is an in person event at A Room of One's Own.

ABOUT THE BOOKS

A Safe Girl to Love

A new edition of two-time Lambda Literary Award–winner Casey Plett’s acclaimed debut short story collection

By the author of Little Fish and A Dream of a Woman, eleven unique short stories feature young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love, in settings ranging from a rural Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn. These stories, shiny with whisky and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show that growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never predictable.

A Safe Girl to Love, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction, was first published in 2014. Now back in print after a long absence, this new edition includes an afterword by the author that reflects on trans writing and representation in our current political climate.

Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang.

Side B finds Tracy in 2019, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open.

Motifs recur like musical phrases, and traces of what used to be there peek through, like a palimpsest. Any Other City is a novel about friendship and other forms of love, travelling in a body across decades, and transmuting trauma through art making and queer sex—a love letter to trans femmes and to art itself.

Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, and A Safe Girl to Love; the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers; and the publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the Winnipeg Free Press, among other publications. Winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award twice, she has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She splits her time between New York City and Windsor, Ontario. caseyplett.com

Hazel Jane Plante is a librarian, musician, cat photographer, coastal creature, and writer. Her debut novel, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) (Metonymy Press, 2019), received a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for both a Publishing Triangle Award and a BC and Yukon Book Prize. Her second novel, Any Other City, releases in April 2023 from Arsenal Pulp Press. She releases solo music under the name lo-fi lioness, hosts a podcast about writing while trans called t4t, and lives with her gorgeous cat, Gus, on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəyə̓m (Musqueam), Sḵwxw̱ú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. hazeljaneplante.com