Byron Lane is author of the novels Big Gay Wedding and A Star Is Bored. The New York Times Book Review calls his writing "wildly funny and irreverent." He's also a playwright, screenwriter, Emmy-winning journalist, and former assistant to actress and writer Carrie Fisher. He's originally from New Orleans and lives in Palm Springs, California, with his husband, author Steven Rowley, and their rescue dogs, Raindrop and Shirley.
Anna Dorn is the author of Perfume & Pain, Exalted, and Vagablonde. Exalted was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her fourth novel American Spirits is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. She lives in Los Angeles.
Jason Blitman (he/him) produces and hosts the book podcast Gays Reading where guests have included queer icons Charles Busch, Garrard Conley, Armistead Maupin, RuPaul's Ginger Minj, Jeopardy!'s Amy Schneider, The Old Gays, among many others. He's also an arts and culture producer and theatre director, most recently directing Sweeney Todd for San Diego Musical Theatre. As the former Associate Artistic Director for TheaterWorksUSA, Jason cast the original Off-Broadway production of The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, as well as produced and developed dozens of new works with acclaimed theatre writers. Jason has worked at The Public Theater, The New York Philharmonic, The Old Globe, and more. You can find him on Instagram @jasonblitman and jasonblitman.com

Charles Jensen (he/him) wrote Splice of Life: A Memoir in 13 Film Genres. His most recent collection of poetry is Instructions between Takeoff and Landing. His previous books include two collections of poetry and seven chapbooks of cross-genre work. The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs designated him a 2019-2020 Cultural Trailblazer. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Journal, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner, and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Exposition Review, The Florida Review, and Passages North.
Dave Karger is a host on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). An award-winning host, interviewer, and entertainment expert, Dave began guest hosting on TCM in 2016 and was named an official host in 2018. He is also the host of TCM’s Musical Matinee, celebrating the musical genre each Saturday. He has made more than 200 live appearances on NBC’s Today. In 2018 he co-hosted ABC’s Live from the Red Carpet on Oscar night. His first book, 50 Oscar Nights: Iconic Stars & Filmmakers on Their Career Defining Wins was released in January 2024.
In 2015, Dave received the Publicists Guild Press Award honoring the year’s outstanding entertainment journalist. In 2014, he was named one of OUT Magazine’s “OUT 100,” acknowledging the most influential people in the LGBT community.
From 2012 to 2016, Dave served as Chief Correspondent at Fandango, creating and hosting the original video series “The Frontrunners,” which received a 2013 Webby Award nomination for Best Variety Series. Before that, Dave spent 17 years as a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly, where he wrote more than 50 cover stories on subjects including George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Elton John, Taylor Swift, Johnny Depp, Denzel Washington and Carrie Underwood.
In 2012 and 2013, Dave was the Academy’s official red-carpet greeter on Oscar night and only the third person ever to hold that post. Dave graduated cum laude from Duke University.
Martine McDonald is a film curator, arts educator and writer dedicated to social impact storytelling and anti-bias education. Her journey in narrative change includes roles with Journeys in Film, New York International Children’s Film Festival, and most recently, serving as the Director of Artist Development at Outfest. Martine's work includes committees, programs and consultations with Firelight Media, Gotham Week, Tribeca Institute and SXSWEdu. Founder of Practice Wonder, she is committed to sculpting inclusive representations of childhood, serving clients such as Sinking Ship and Moonbug Entertainment. Martine earned an MFA in Social and Environmental Arts Practice and a Bachelor of Arts in Peace Studies from Naropa University.
Shayna Maci Warner is a GLAAD Rising Star-awarded Brooklyn- based writer and film programmer who is obsessed with television. Their words on queer films, shows, and feelings have appeared in Paste magazine, The Film Stage, Women and Hollywood, and Autostraddle, among other publications, and they have contributed to festival programming at NewFest, Outfest, Tribeca, and Nitehawk Cinema. To argue with Shayna’s opinions on hot evil lesbians, you can find them at criticallyqueer.com.
David Church is the award-winning author of Thomas Edison and the Purgatory Equation and Thomas Edison and the Lazarus Vessel, the first two installments in his genre mash-up series, 'The Edison Trilogy.' He wrote the ecological children's book, Larue and the Brown Sky (illustrations by Toby Bluth) and co-authored the cult musical, Judy's Scary Little Christmas (with Jim Webber and Joe Patrick Ward.) in addition to developing films for United Artists, NBC and CBS including Psychic Housewife and Saving Grace. His final adventure with Mr. Edison, Thomas Edison and the Magi Solution, will be published in April 2025. David is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America West.

WE ARE FAMILY: THE MANY FACES & PLACES OF QUEER COMMUNITIES & FAMILIES

Lucas Hilderbrand is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of the books The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, the Queer Film Classics book on Paris Is Burning and the forthcoming British Film Institute Film Classics book on The Before Trilogy: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight. He lives in Los Angeles.
Lane Igoudin is the author of A Family, Maybe, a gay couple's journey through foster adoptions to fatherhood (Ooligan Press, Portland State University, 2024). He has written extensively on foster adoption, parenting, and LGBTQ topics for Adoption.com, FamilyEquality.org, Forward, Lambda Literary Review, and LGBTQ Nation, and spoken about his book on NBC's "Daytime" show as well as a variety of syndicated radio shows and parenting and literary podcasts. Lane is professor of English/ESL at Los Angeles City College and recently served as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow with the Humanities Division of UCLA. See more at LaneIgoudin.com.
Diane Anderson-Minshall is an award-wining writer and editor, who has led some of the leading LGBTQ+ media outlets in the U.S. including having served as the CEO and editorial director of Pride Media Inc. (home to Out, The Advocate, Plus, Pride, and OutTraveler) and serving in chief editorial roles at GO, The Advocate, Curve, Plus, Girlfriends, Passport, and QSF.
Diane and her co-conspirator, Jacob, have been married for more than three decades. They wrote about their experience transitioning from a lesbian couple to husband and wife in their memoir, Queerly Beloved: A Love Story across Genders, for which they received a Goldie award from the Golden Crown Literary Society. The pair also co-authored the Blind Eye mystery series with the titles Blind Curves, Blind Faith, and Blind Leap, all through the largest LGBT publisher, Bold Strokes Books.
In addition, Diane also penned the mystery novel Punishment With Kisses, and her work has appeared in dozens of anthologies (Reading The L Word, Bitchfest, Women of the Mean Streets).
Penelope Starr is the author of the nonfiction book, The Radical Act of Community Storytelling: Empowering Voices in Uncensored Events and the founder of Odyssey Storytelling, in Tucson, AZ. Her sun sign is Cancer, she is a seven on the Enneagram, is an ENFJ Myers-Briggs type, and her Human Design type is Manifestor, so she enjoys creative endeavors, facilitating workshops, and giving advice. Born in New York City, she migrated to the West more than fifty years ago and now lives in the foothills of the Tucson Mountains with her partner, Silvia, and their very smart dog, Kosmos. See what she’s up to at penelopestarr.com.
Mei Ling Tom was born and raised in Los Angeles and lives in Palm Springs. After 30 years of teaching in the field of Special Education, she retired 10 years ago. Mei Ling has spent the past seven years on the board of the L-Fund, a non-profit that supports cis, trans and queer identifying lesbians in financial crisis, education, the arts, and health and wellness. When she’s not L-funding, you may see her working at the Palm Springs Vintage Market, dancing hula, cooking, traveling, reading and spending time with family and friends. Mei Ling is especially cherishes spending time with her two children and three year old twin grandkids!

Curtis Chin is the author of the award-winning memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. A co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, Chin served as the non-profits’ first Executive Director. He went on to write comedy for network and cable before transitioning to social justice documentaries. Chin has screened his films at over 600 venues in twenty countries. He has written for CNN, Bon Appetit, the Detroit Free Press, and the Emancipator/Boston Globe. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Chin has received awards from ABC/Disney Television, New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and more. He is currently working on a docuseries on the history of Chinese restaurants in the US. He can be reached at info@curtisfromdetroit.com
Cheryl Klein is the author of Crybaby (Brown Paper Press), a memoir about wanting a baby and getting cancer instead. She also wrote a story collection, The Commuters (City Works Press) and a novel, Lilac Mines (Manic D Press). As a columnist and co-editor for MUTHA Magazine, she enjoys the chance to share her parenting joys and worries with a community of mothers and others. Her stories and essays have appeared in Blunderbuss, The Normal School, Razorcake, Literary Mama, and several anthologies. Her MUTHA column “Onesie, Never Worn” was selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2022. She blogs about the intersection of art, life and carbohydrates at breadandbread.blogspot.com. Follow her on Twitter @cherylekleinla.
Sarah Viren is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of the essay collection, Mine, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and longlisted for the PEN/ Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She is also the author of To Name the Bigger Lie, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, she teaches in the creative writing program at Arizona State University.
Jason Yamas is a queer writer, producer and actor. His debut memoir Tweakerworld won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Memoir. He holds a BFA from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts and is currently working on his first novel while developing Tweakerworld as a television series. He lives in Los Angeles, has a chiweenie named Spektor and a beautiful daughter named Swayze.
Stephanie Theobald is a British author, journalist and broadcaster known for her playful and thoughtful work around sexuality, alternative feminism, and new ways of thinking about nature. She writes for the Guardian, the Sunday Times and Condé Nast Traveller, broadcasts for the BBC and used to work as a senior editor at Harper’s Bazaar UK in London.
She is the author of four novels and a memoir, Sex Drive (Unbound, paperback 2024.) The Guardian described Sex Drive as “Thelma and Louise meets Eat Pray Love.” The memoir documents what happens when a woman takes time out to listen to her body.
For the past five years Stephanie has been living in California, in a cave community in the Mojave desert near Joshua Tree National Park. She has just finished a memoir about this experience.

Carla Sameth (Photo Credit - Hilary Jones)

Trinity Nguyen (Photo Credit- Long Nguyen)

Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and raised in suburban Los Angeles. He is the author of the novels Still Water Saints, The Five Acts of Diego León and The Sons of El Rey, as well as a book of nonfiction, Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime. Alex teaches at UC-Riverside where he serves as the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing.
George M. Johnson (they/them) is an Emmy nominated, award-winning, and bestselling Black nonbinary author and activist. They have written on race, gender, sex, and culture for Essence, The Advocate, BuzzFeed News, Teen Vogue, and more than forty other national publications. George has appeared on BuzzFeed’s AM2DM as well as on MSNBC. They are also a proud HBCU alum twice over and a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated. Their debut memoir, All Boys Aren’t Blue, was a New York Times bestseller and garnered many accolades. It was the second-most banned book of 2022 in the United States, according to the American Library Association. For their work fighting book bans and challenges, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) honored George with its Free Speech Defender Award, and TIME Magazine named them one of the “100 Next Most Influential People in the World.” While writing their memoir, George used he/him pronouns. Originally from Plainfield, New Jersey, they now live in Los Angeles, California.
Trinity Nguyen is a Vietnamese American author and a recent graduate of Franklin & Marshall College. She writes messy diaspora kids and queer girls with big smiles and big hearts, and currently lives in Southern California with her cats. A Bánh Mì for Two is her debut novel.
Carla Rachel Sameth was the 2022-2024 Co-Poet Laureate for Altadena, CA and a 2023 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Her books include the memoir, One Day on the Gold Line, the chapbook, What Is Left, and the poetry collection, Secondary Inspections. Carla’s writing on blended/unblended, queer, multiracial and single parent families appears in a variety of publications and has been selected three times as Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. a Pasadena Rose Poet, a West Hollywood Pride Poet, and a former PEN Teaching Artist, Carla teaches creative writing to high school and college students, incarcerated youth and other diverse communities.
Rebecca Olarte was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and spent over a decade in the Bay Area before making a home in Cathedral City with her wife, Sol. Rebecca is on the board of the Palm Springs Public Library Foundation where she chairs the Communications Committee. Rebecca co-hosts The Binge Movie Podcast with Jason Leroy and is a member of GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. When not reading or collecting books, Rebecca enjoys playing music and looking at birds.

Izzy Wasserstein is a queer, trans woman who teaches writing and literature. Wasserstein was born and raised in Kansas, and she received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico. She is the author of dozens of short stories, two poetry collections, the short story collection All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From (A Lambda Literary Award finalist), and the novella These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart (Tachyon, 2024). She loves good conversations, bad jokes, and being bullied by her cat. She shares a home in Southern California with her spouse Nora E. Derrington and their animal companions.
Will Dean is a writer, editor and communications executive who lives in Palm Springs. He is a journalist with 26 years of experience. A highlight of his career was creating and launching with The Desert Sun in 2012 a monthly LGBTQ+ news and feature magazine, Desert Outlook, for the USA TODAY Network. Dean also co-founded the Desert Outbook Book Club which still meets monthly, and he continues to write for various publications and supports Brothers of the Desert and other nonprofit efforts.
Daniel M. Jaffe is an internationally published, award-winning writer. His new short story collection, Domestic Affairs: Tales of American Males, is described by Rainbow Book Reviews as “a joy to read.” The author of many novels and short story collections, Daniel pioneered an ongoing les-bi-gay writing workshop at The Cambridge Center for Adult Education in the 1990’s, then taught creative writing in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program for over 20 years.
Kwei Quartey is a crime fiction writer who lives in Pasadena. His Darko Dawson and Emma Djan Investigations series are set in Ghana, where Kwei was born to a Ghanaian father and Black American mother. The Missing American is a 2021 Edgar Award nominee for Best First PI Novel and nominee for the Edgar Allan Poe Best Novel. Sleep Well, My Lady won the 2021 Shamus Award and is an 2022 Edgar nominee for Best Novel. Kwei’s latest Emma Djan novel, The Whitewashed Tombs, releases September 3, 2024
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the New Yorker, NY Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017 and earned a place as a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award among other honors. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, 2024 is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.