Sex with a Brain Injury by Annie Liontas

Lost City Books

Reading and conversation with Annie Liontas and Jeannie Vanasco, author of The Glass Eye.

We've reached our RSVP limit for this free event, but you're welcome to show up and see if there's space! Seating will be first come first served.

About the book: Featured on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross and SELF book of the month.For readers of Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, and Melissa Febos’s Girlhood, a powerful and deeply personal memoir in essays that sheds light on the silent epidemic of head trauma. Annie Liontas suffered multiple concussions in her thirties. In Sex with a Brain Injury, she writes about what it means to be one of the “walking wounded,” facing her fear, her rage, her physical suffering, and the effects of head trauma on her marriage and other relationships. Forced to reckon with her own queer mother’s battle with addiction, Liontas finds echoes in their pain. Liontas weaves history, philosophy, and personal accounts to interrogate and expand representations of mental health, ability, and disability—particularly in relation to women and the LGBT community. She uncovers the surprising legacy of brain injury, examining its role in culture, the criminal justice system, and through historical figures like Henry VIII and Harriet Tubman. Encountering Liontas’s sharp, affecting prose, the reader can imagine this kind of pain, and having to claw one’s way back to a new normal. The hidden gift of injury, Liontas writes, is the ability to connect with others. For the millions of people who have suffered from concussions and for those who have endeavored to support loved ones through the painful and often baffling experience of head trauma, this astonishing and compassionate narrative offers insight and hope in equal measure. Annie Liontas is the genderqueer author of the crip-queer memoir Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery, which was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and selected as SELF Magazine’s Book of the Month. Their debut novel, Let Me Explain You, was selected as New York Times Editors Choice in 2015. They co-edited the anthology A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors, and their work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Electric Literature, BOMB, Lithub, The Believer, American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s, Oprah Daily, and elsewhere. A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, Annie is an Associate Professor of writing at George Washington University and serves as faculty at the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Annie has volunteered as a mentor for Pen City’s incarcerated writers and helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. They co-host the literary podcast <a href="https://linktr.ee/litfriendspodcast" title="https://linktr.ee/litfriendspodcast" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">LitFriends</a> and live in Philadelphia with their wife, dog, and Email the rabbit. Annie will be joined in conversation by Jeannie Vanasco. Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye, which Poets &amp; Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Her third book, A Silent Treatment, will be published by Tin House in fall 2025. Accessibility note: This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator. Please contact events@lostcitybookstore.com with questions. Dato de accesibilidad: Este evento toma lugar en el segundo piso y Lost City Books no tiene ascensor. Favor de contactar events@lostcitybookstore.com con cualquiera duda.

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Ticket sales have ended

Sex with a Brain Injury by Annie Liontas

More events from Lost City Books

Follow organizers to get events picked for you

One Leg On Earth by 'Pemi Aguda

The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Tibuleac

Body Weather by Lorraine Boissoneault

Minerva by Keila Vall De La Ville

Hidden Companions by Ahmad Nabil

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