Play, Orchestra, Play - Play Something Sweet and Light and Gay
moderated by Matthew Félix

Come celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride Month at the Mechanics' Institute with this musical author event moderated by Matthew Félix.

Local writers speak about the use of music in their books, at an event celebrating LGBTQ+ Pride. Participants will include: Vernon Keeve III (Southern Migrant Mixtape), Lori Ostlund (After the Parade) and Alec Scott (Until It Shimmers). There will be tunes, short readings of passages tied to them, some questions, some answers.

About the speakers:

Matthew Félix is an author, podcaster, and speaker. On his Matthew Félix on Air and as host of the San Francisco Writers Conference podcast, he has interviewed NY Times bestselling authors, leaders of organizations such as LitQuake, the Mill Valley Film Festival, and the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, and notable figures in fields as diverse as travel, health, and the environment. Matthew also regularly speaks about subjects ranging from creativity to podcasting to marketing for authors. Publishers Weekly’s BookLife Prize called his debut novel, A Voice Beyond Reason, “(a) highly crafted gem,” and his latest book, Porcelain Travels, won Gold for Humor in the Readers’ Favorite Awards and was a Foreword INDIES Humor Book of the Year Award finalist.

Trey (also known as Vernon Keeve III) is a Virginia born, queer writer. They currently live and teach in Oakland. They hold a MFA from CCA, and a MA in Teaching Literature from Bard College. Trey's full-length collection of poetry, Southern Migrant Mixtape, was published by Nomadic Press in 2018 and is the recipient of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Trey continues to write poetry while working on their first novel, and they will be attending Columbia University in the fall to pursue a doctorate in English Education. 

Lori Ostlund’s novel After the Parade was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her story collection, The Bigness of the World, won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda Finalist. Her work has appeared in the 2010 Best American Short Stories and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories as well as in ZYZZYVA, New England Review, and other journals. Lori has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and was a 2017 Joyce Carol Oates Prize finalist. She has been a teacher for over twenty-five years—in New Mexico, Spain, Malaysia, and North Carolina, and San Francisco—and is currently on the Mile-High MFA faculty at Regis University in Denver. She is the Series Editor of the Flannery O'Connor Award.

Alec Scott is a Canadian writer living in Oakland. A former barrister, he has worked as an editor and columnist at Toronto Life magazine and a producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Since moving to the Bay Area his work has featured in the Guardian, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and magazines including Sunset, Sierra, Report on Business, and the Smithsonian. He has both studied and taught writing at Stanford. His long-form pieces have been nominated for 13 National Magazine Awards, winning three. An avid traveler, he has gone all over on assignment, and some of the resulting stories have won awards -- a Lowell Thomas gold, a North American Travel Journalists' Association gold and an Eureka. He studied literature at Dartmouth College (A.B.) and Trinity College (Dublin) (M.Phil.) and law at the University of Toronto (J.D.) He also has a book about San Francisco coming out shortly, Oldest San Francisco, from Reedy Press. www.alecscott.com

Please email Taryn Edwards if you have any questions - [email protected]. Masks are strongly encouraged for unvaccinated individuals. Photos and/or video may be taken at this event.

Programming in "Civil Rights, Artistic Diversity, Historical Reckoning: Exploring the Film, Literature, and Lives of Marginalized Communities" has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.

Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.