Every year, as part of LGBT History Month, the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies hosts a Queer Studies lecture.  Past presenters have included trans novelist T Cooper and science fiction writer Charlie Jane Anders. This year, we are pleased to feature Hilary Zaid.  

Zaid’s novel, Paper is White, is a beautiful rumination on loss, commemoration, and the queering of history, set in 1990s San Francisco.  Ellen Margolis, the protagonist, is an assistant curator at the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory; she gathers narratives from Holocaust survivors as she plans her own wedding and remakes Jewish tradition to establish her own queer family.  

Ms. Zaid will read from her novel, and then she and Isom Director Jaime Harker will start a conversation about queer life in the 1990s, activism, and the roots of marriage equality, which will then broaden to include the audience. Please join us for a lively exploration of queer pasts and queer futures.

Her lecture is October 25th at 4 PM in Lamar 126.

About Hilary Zaid:

A 2017 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Hilary Zaid is also an alumna of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Tin House Writers' Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in print and online venues including Lilith Magazine, The Southwest Review, The Utne Reader, CALYX, The Santa Monica Review, and The Tahoma Literary Review and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. An alumna of Harvard and Radcliffe, she holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and works as a freelance editor. Paper is White is her first novel.