Presented in partnership with Vancouver Public Library.
Join us at Incite for a lively celebration of the re-issue of A Safe Girl to Love by Casey Plett, and the release of Any Other City by Hazel Jane Plante. The two Lambda Literary Award-winning authors will be in conversation with C.A. Tanaka, author of Baby Drag Queen.
Multi-award-winning author Casey Plett made her literary debut with the short story collection A Safe Girl to Love. After a long absence, this beloved collection of stories about the lives of young trans women is back in print. Plett, whose books have recurring characters and themes, has come to view A Safe Girl to Love as the first book in a loose trilogy along with her novel Little Fish and her story collection A Dream of a Woman.
Any Other City is the much-anticipated novel from Hazel Jane Plante, whose debut novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) won a Lambda Literary Award in 2019. The novel is written as the fictionalized memoir of trans indie musician Tracy St. Cyr and “sparkles with heart and sex, art and life”—Michelle Tea. This is a love letter to trans femmes and to art itself.
Discover two of the most sought-after young writers in Canada, at the Vancouver stop of their popular North American tour.
Participants and Speakers
Casey Plett
CASEY PLETT is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, and A Safe Girl to Love; the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers; and the publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the Winnipeg Free Press, among other publications. Winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award twice, she has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She splits her time between New York City and Windsor, Ontario.
Hazel Jane Plante
HAZEL JANE PLANTE is a librarian, musician, cat photographer, coastal creature, and writer. Her debut novel, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) (Metonymy Press, 2019), received a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for both a Publishing Triangle Award and a BC and Yukon Book Prize. Her second novel, Any Other City, is forthcoming in April 2023 from Arsenal Pulp Press. She releases solo music under the name lo-fi lioness, hosts a podcast about writing while trans called t4t, and lives with her gorgeous cat, Gus, on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Candie Tanaka
CANDIE TANAKA is a multiracial trans writer, artist and librarian challenging the binaries continually reconstructed between self and other while exploring archive and memory in a socio-political context. They are a creative writing graduate of The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University and have a BFA in Intermedia from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. Their first YA book, Baby Drag Queen was published with Orca Books in April 2023. They’ve also published work in Resonance: Essays on the Craft of Life and Writing with Anvil Press and This Will Only Take A Minute: Canadian Flash Fiction with Guernica Editions.