6p to 8p
Join us for a very special evening in celebration of Queers at the Table: An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food (with Recipes). Editors Megan J. Elias & Alex D Ketchum will be joined in a panel discussion with fellow contributors Ericka Mabrie, Isabel Barbosa, Pri Aguilar, K Greene and Rani Som.
Expect good conversation, a Q + A, a book signing, and some mingling!
◣◣◣
About the book:
Food has long played an important role in queer culture. Lesbian- and queer women-run feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses have been safe spaces for queer and trans folk where gender norms can be challenged and where female authority is legitimized. During the AIDS epidemic, gay men and their allies centred food as an expression of collective care for those who needed it most. And queer and trans folk have asserted themselves in a restaurant culture largely controlled by white cisgender men.
Queers at the Table celebrates the various intersections between queers and food. In its essays, comics, and recipes, the book shows how this shared culture fosters connections, defies norms, honours legacies, and creates community. Taylor Hartson and Tristian Lee write about a queer farming community in which queerness is part of a broad network of living things to be enjoyed and shared; Danielle Kydd writes about food security issues as faced by LGBTQ2S+ folk; and Blue Delliquanti's comic on urban foraging in Minneapolis demonstrates the role of a queer friend group in a local ecosystem.
In full colour throughout, Queers at the Table is a diverse and enriching anthology that reveals the myriad nurturing ways that queerness informs food production and restaurant culture and how food empowers, transforms, and unites queer and trans folk.
ERICKA MABRIE ◤ (she/her) is an Earth worker, baker, spiritual herbalist and entrepreneur based in Brooklyn, NY. (BA, Economics, Georgetown University) She is the founder of Faery Good, an Earth-rooted microbakery and herbal practice for whimsical living that helps cultivate resilience and alignment through heart-centered awareness. Additionally, she is part of the Hattie Carthan Community Foodways in Brooklyn, where she serves as an ancestral land steward, practicing regenerative urban agriculture and using ancestral technologies to advance a more equitable and vibrant local food system
ISABEL BARBOSA ◤ (they/them) is a disabled, genderqueer, transdisciplinary artist and researcher. Through an embodied research practice that inverts the hierarchy of the senses and prioritizes intimate, relationally-transmitted knowledge, their work explores the various intersections between food, queerness, philosophy, and art. They have a particular interest in immersive modalities that engage the body holistically, and create experiential work that involve audiences as embodied participants - whether it be through writing, installation, performance, or shared meal. Currently residing in Brooklyn and working to finish a Master of Arts in Gastronomy, their everyday life is focused on cultivating community care and eating well.
PRI AGUILAR ◤ (they/them) is a non-binary, queer, Peruvian-American, storyteller and culinary artist. Their food is centered around comfort food complimented with seasonal ingredients and unique flavors that reflect their influence of the multicultural communities growing up in NYC. They also run Nueva Yolk, an ice cream and sorbet pop-up that honors distinct flavors of the Latin American diaspora.
K GREENE ◤(they/them) is a green-hearted seed being, seed grower, and lover of tiny things. Greene started their seed path as a librarian doing storytime with kids as well as turning the front lawn of the library into a seed garden and seed library. In 2009, they co-founded the Hudson Valley Seed Co. with their partner, Doug Muller. As a seed saving teacher and seed literacy educator, Greene began developing non-binary botanical language outside the confines of the patriarchal and heteronormative anthropomorphism of plants. They have enjoyed organizing and facilitating non-binary botany round tables and panels including at the 2021 NOFA-NY conference and the 2022 Organic Seed Growers Conference. Currently, they are the manager of the Seed Growing Program at Hudson Valley Farm Hub which includes supporting Indigenous seed rematriation and diasporic seed relationships and the Non-Binary Botany Project.
RANI SOM ◤ (she/her) is an Indian-American trans femme visual artist and author. Her work (published under the name Bishakh Som) has appeared in The New Yorker, MoMA.org, Autostraddle, The Strumpet, The Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review and The Brooklyn Rail, amongst other publications. Her graphic novel Apsara Engine (The Feminist Press) is the winner of a 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel and a 2021 Lambda Literary Award winner for Best LGBTQ Comics. Her graphic memoir Spellbound (Street Noise Books) was also a 2021 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Rani has illustrated two books about architecture: The Prefab Bathroom: An Architectural History, (McFarland Press) and Cocktails and Conversations: Dialogues on Architectural Design (AIA New York). Rani’s artwork was featured in solo shows at ArtLexis Gallery and at Jaya Yoga Center and in group shows at The Society of Illustrators in New York, the Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College, Issyra Gallery, the Grady Alexis Gallery, De Cacaofabriek in the Netherlands and most recently at Art Omi in Ghent, NY. You can see her work at www.bishakh.com.
DR. MEGAN J. ELIAS ◤ is Director of Food Studies Programs at Boston University. A historian of American foodways, she is the author of five books about food history. Her most recent book was Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture (Penn Press 2017). At BU Elias teaches courses in food history, food and gender, and food memoirs and the Introduction to Gastronomy. She is currently working on a book about the hospitality industry and also a book on food for the ‘Gendered Perspectives’ series published by Taylor and Francis. Her other books include Stir it Up: Home Economics and American Culture (Penn Press, 2009); Lunch: a History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)