Eileen G'Sell

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Stephanie Mattina

A close-up of Eileen G'Sell.

Eileen G'Sell

media release: A Room of One's Own Bookstore is thrilled to welcome Eileen G'Sell for a reading and discussion in celebration of her new release Lipstick (Object Lessons). She will be joined in conversation with Meghan Allynn Johnson.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

From Revlon to Glossier, from Marilyn to Gaga, lipstick is as shape-shifting and unwieldy as femininity itself.

Who wears lipstick today – as a matter of routine? And for those who do, is it out of obligation to a strict feminine standard, or some other reason entirely? Lipstick reconsiders the beauty world's most conspicuous – and contentious – tool of artifice. Tossing expired ideas about femininity like so many tubes of melting wax, Lipstick explores how self-adornment can be a source of play, pleasure, and transformation, as well as how lipstick can knock gender norms off balance.

Endorsed by both queer radical feminist Sophie Lewis and Lebanese-American journalist Zahra Hankir, Lipstick joins Bloomsbury's Object Lessons on February 19th. Rather than a staid history of the object itself, the book mingles personal narrative, historical research, and cultural critique to unpack how lipstick both reaffirms and challenges gender norms. Jack Halberstam, Judith Butler, and bell hooks are all cited at length, as the book mines the longstanding tensions between femininity and feminism. Crucially, Lipstick also includes the voices of women (cis and trans) and nonbinary people between 18 and 75, across race, class, and culture, interviewed in 2024. An entire section is devoted to lipstick bans at high schools targeting gender nonconforming students, and the book ends with the voices of the author's Gen Z students.

Eileen G’Sell (she/her) is a poet and culture critic whose work focuses on gender, sexuality, and economic class. She was born in St. Louis and earned a BA at Knox College, an MA at the University of Rochester, and an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018 by Gold Wake Press. Her second book of poetry, Francofilaments, was published in 2024 by Broken Sleep Books.

G’Sell’s poetry has been published in Poetry magazine, Fence, DIAGRAM, Oversound, The Rumpus, and The Boston Review; her essays have been published in The Baffler, Dame, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Current Affairs, and Jacobin. She serves as movie critic for The Hopkins Review and makes frequent contributions to Hyperallergic and Reverse Shot. In 2023, she won the Rabkin Prize for excellence in arts writing. Her first book of nonfiction, Lipstick, joins the Object Lessons series in early 2026. G’Sell is Teaching Professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Meghan Allynn Johnson (she/her) is an artist, educator, and death worker whose work centers care, grief, and collective forms of meaning-making. She is the co-founder of Madison Death Studio, an online and community-based resource offering education, rituals, and a community to learn about death care practices.

Across her creative practice, Meghan works as a producer of spaces for shared inquiry - bringing artists, writers, and community members together around themes of loss, intimacy, embodiment, and survival within violent and extractive systems. Her work is grounded in feminist traditions of care labor, mutual aid, and consciousness-raising, where creativity functions as a tool for connection, resistance, and repair.

Her artwork has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, and her work has been published with the David Krut Print Workshop in Johannesburg and included in Singular/Serial: Contemporary Monotype and Monoprint. She holds a BFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis’s Sam Fox School of Art.