2023 Festival:
October 16–22
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Incite: Love, Lives – An Evening with Casey Plett and Hazel Jane Plante

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 andsparkles 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.

Books will be for sale before and after the event courtesy of Book Warehouse, a division of Black Bond Books.

Join us for Incite all season, in-person or online! This readings series offers conversations with celebrated authors and emerging talents every two weeks from January to June. Incite is free and open to all

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.

C. A. Tanaka

C.A. TANAKA is a trans masculine multiracial writer of Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian and Scottish descent. A graduate of The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University, they have a BFA in intermedia from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design and, in 2017, were awarded a fully funded literary residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. C.A. is the executive director for the Storytelling with Drag Queens Foundation, a local non-profit organization with a mandate to promote diversity and inclusion in literacy for children, teens and adults. They live in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unceded ancestral homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.