On Saturday, March 24, Ana Simo will appear at The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division to read from her provocative first novel, Heartland, along with author, activist, and co-founder of #theLesbianAvengers Sarah Schulman. 

A word-drunk romp through an alternate, pre-apocalyptic United States, Ana Simo's fiction debut is the uproarious story of a thwarted writer’s elaborate revenge on the woman who stole her lover. Blending elements of telenovela, pulp noir, and dystopian satire, Heartland is above all a hallucinatory indictment of racism, American style.

A New Yorker most of her life, Ana Simo came of age in a Cuba where a revolution’s sense of endless freedom was almost immediately replaced by iron-fisted censorship and rabidly homophobic witch-hunts that jailed or institutionalized LGBT people, forcing her and others to flee.

In France, she studied with Roland Barthes, participated in early women’s and gay/lesbian rights groups, also continued a life-long dialogue with European (& American) writers. Her literary family includes the profane, anti-clerical satirist Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel), Robert Walser (Jakob von Gunten), Kathy Acker (Don Quixote) and Marie NDiaye (The Woman Changed Into A Log).

Immigrating finally to New York in the 1970s, Simo put down roots in the artistically and politically transgressive East Village where she co-founded the city’s first openly lesbian theater, Medusa’s Revenge, and felt free to attack her persistent preoccupations of immigration and assimilation, history, guilt, race, sex, and the impossibility of language, themes that appear in Heartland and throughout her work from the early play Pickaxe about Trotsky’s murder to The Opium Wars, a collaboration with composer Zeena Parkins.

Simo is also the co-founder of the direct action group the Lesbian Avengers, the national cable program Dyke TV, and The Gully online magazine, offering queer views on everything.

Sarah Schulman's work spans novels, plays, journalism, and nonfiction. She is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the College of Staten Island. Some of her recent works include the movie United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, and the nonfiction work Conflict is not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair. Her 19th book, MAGGIE TERRY, a novel of murder and intrigues, will be published in September 2018 by The Feminist Press.

The Bureau of General Services--Queer Division is an independent, all-volunteer queer cultural center, bookstore, and event space hosted by The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York City. in New York City.

Where: Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 208 W 13th St #210, New York, NY 10011.
When: Saturday, March 24, 2018 at 7PM.