Carol Queen (she/her) is co-founder of the Center for Sex & Culture in San Francisco as well as staff sexologist and Company Historian at Good Vibrations, the women-founded sex shop, where she has worked since 1990. A noted writer and cultural sexologist whose work has been widely published, she's written or edited several books, most recently The Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex for Everyone. 

 

Dawn McGuire (she/her)  is a neurologist and author of four poetry collections, Sleeping in Africa, Hands On, The Aphasia Cafe and American Dream with Exit Wound. She grew up in Eastern Kentucky and was educated at Princeton University, Union Theological Seminary, and Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the Neurosciences Institute of Morehouse School of Medicine, and divides her time between Atlanta and Northern California.

 

Dolly Rose (she/her) is a Black Leather Dyke and Bootblack based in the Bay Area. She was the very first San Francisco Bootblack, earning her title in 2018. She has served the Bay Area Bootblack community by organizing Boot Lab, working the stand at The Eagle and private community events, teaching workshops, and providing mentorship to new Bootblacks.

 

Gail Tsukiyama (she/her) was the recipient of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and was the first author to receive the Asia Pacific Leadership Award from the Center of the Pacific Rim and the Ricci Institute. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has taught at San Francisco State University, University of California, Berkeley and Mills College. She has also been a freelance book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and Ms Magazine. She is the author of eight novels including Women of the Silk, The Samurai's Garden, Night of Many Dreams, The Language of Threads, Dreaming Water, The Street of a Thousand Blossoms, A Hundred Flowers, and The Brightest Star.

 

Janine Kovac (she/her) writes about power dynamics and women’s bodies. She is the author of Spinning: Choreography for Coming Home and The Nutcracker Chronicles. Her distinctions include the Elizabeth George Foundation Fellowship from Hedgebrook, the Calderwood Fellowship for Journalism from MacDowell, and the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her fiction is sponsored by Fractured Atlas. Read more at janinekovac.com.

 

Janine Mogannam (she/her) is a Palestinian American poet,  librarian, and literary curator from San Francisco (Ramaytush Ohlone land). She is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and Still Here San Francisco, and her work has been supported by VONA, Interdisciplinary Writers’ Lab, The Speakeasy Project, and Tin House. As a Creating Queer Community fellow, Janine curated the National Queer Arts Festival’s first queer and trans Arab American performance. Her work can be found in The Margins, Apogee, The Quarry, anthologies including Ask the Night for a Dream and Heaven Looks Like Us, and elsewhere.

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Jewelle Gomez (she/her) is a Black, Native, lesbian feminist, poet, and playwright. Her nine books include the double Lambda Award winning novel, The Gilda Stories, which has been in print for more than thirty years. New Conservatory Theatre Center (SF) commissioned and produced her most recent three plays. She was a founding member of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the Board of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation. She served as President of the San Francisco Library Commission and Director of the American Poetry Center at SFSU; she and her partner, Diane Sabin, were litigants in the 2004 marriage equality lawsuit in California.

 

Karen Joy Fowler (she/her)  is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels and three short story collections. Her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Hernovel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and was short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Her most recent  novel Booth published in March 2022 and was long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize.

 

Mason J. (he/they) is a Lambda Literary–awarded Afro-Indigenous Two-Spirit artist, educator, and historiographer from San Francisco. A multidisciplinary creator, pre-k to post-grad educator, and public health advocate, they serve on the GLBT Historical Society board and have collaborated with VONA Voices, Still Here SF, Scholastic Inc, African American Shakespeare Company, Transgender Cultural District, Opera Parallèle, and SFPL’s Hormel Center.

 

Sarah Moon (she/her)  is the author of queer middle grade books, including Sparrow, Middletown and most recently Family Week.. She is also the co-editor of THE LETTER Q:  Queer Writers’ Letters to Their Younger Selves. A teacher and college counselor, Sarah Moon lives and works in Brooklyn with her wife and their child.

 

Sinead Horan (she/her) is a butch leatherdyke, a poet and essayist, a volunteer archivist at the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, and a PhD candidate in the Art History department at Stanford University. Sinéad was raised on the unforgiving prairie of Alberta, Canada by working class white folks with upward mobility. She now resides in Oakland, California with her wife.

 

Susie Bright (she/her) was a friend and colleague of Dorothy Allison’s, who first edited and published her work in On Our Backs in the 1980s.  Bright reviewed Allison’s work for the The New York Times, and produced Allison’s audio editions of Trash, Skin, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, and Cavedweller. Bright would like to thank Arion Press and Litquake for accepting her proposal to host a Bastard Out of Carolina marathon. We know she’s smiling.

 

Tammy Rae Carland (she/her) is a bay area educator and artist whose work explores queer histories, economic class, and archives as a site of resistance. Her work appears in the permanent collections of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Kadist Art Foundation; San Francisco and Paris; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; and San Francisco International Airport Museum and she is represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery. Additionally, she founded and ran Mr. Lady Records, a southern queer feminist punk record label, was a key member of the Riot Grrrl movement in the ’90s, and her zine collection (1988-2002) is held by The Fales Library at NYU. 

 

Tijanna O. Eaton (Tə-zha-na; she/her) is a Black butch writer whose work appears in Honey Literary, Noyo Review, Yellow Arrow Vignette, slips slips, and Panorama Journal. She was a 2023 Rooted & Written Fellow, a 2024 Soros Justice Fellow, the 2024 Best of the Net nonfiction judge, and a 2025 Money for Women nonfiction judge. She has served on the Five Keys Schools and Programs Board of Directors since 2006 and has been Board Chair since 2021. Tijanna plays from the top down and gets dressed from the bottom up.

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