Three powerful literary voices come together for an evening of readings at Giovanni’s Room, Philadelphia’s legendary LGBT+ bookstore. Exploring identity, history, and the textures of everyday life — come listen, connect, and celebrate the written word.
Poetry
Christian Bancroft
A Michener Fellow and University of Houston PhD, Bancroft’s debut collection A Ghost Has No Fantasies (2026) joins his acclaimed critical book Queering Modernist Translation: The Poetics of Race, Gender, and Queerness. His poems appear in Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and more.
Poetry & Essays
Niki Herd
Author of The Stuff of Hollywood (2024), a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and The Language of Shedding Skin (2011). Her work appears in Poetry Daily, The New England Review, and This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets. She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College.
Fiction
Dino Enrique Piacentini
His debut novel Invasion of the Daffodils (Astrophil Press, 2024) follows a Mexican-American family on an island off the California coast during the Korean War. Stories and essays appear in One Story, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, and The Masters’ Review.
