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In celebration of LGBT Pride Month, Ana Simo will appear at Chicago's American Writers Museum on Tuesday, June 5 at 7PM to discuss her book Heartland, with C. Russell Price, author of Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other.

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.

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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.

C. Russell Price, a 2015 Lambda Fellow in Poetry, is an Appalachian genderqueer poet living in Chicago. They hold a BA from the University of Virginia and an MFA from Northwestern University. Price’s chapbook Tonight, We Fuck The Trailer Park Out Of Each Other will be published by Sibling Rivalry Press in Summer 2016. Price currently works with The Offing and teaches creative writing at Northwestern.

Through innovative and dynamic state-of-the-art exhibitions, as well as compelling programming, the American Writers Museum educates, enriches, provokes, and inspires visitors of all ages.

Where: The American Writers Museum, 180 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60601
When: Tuesday, June 5, 6PM