Pride month's Reading & Meeting's theme is love and features Celeste Chan, Jenny Bitner, Dominic Lim, Chino Lee Chung, June Martin, Jessica Martinez and emceed by Sezin Devi Khoeler.
Chino Lee Chung is a queer Chinese Mexican personal essay writer, grassroots activist, and is currently working on a collection of essays that integrate his social activism with his intersectional identities. He's a recipient of the 2024-2025 San Jose State Steinbeck Fellowship and holds an MFA from the California College of Arts. His work appears in Invitation to Joy – Writer’s Creating in Community, Gender Queer: voices from beyond the sexual binary, Our Family Coalition Newsletter, and is an Assistant Fiction Editor at 14 Hills Literary Magazine.
June Martin is the author of LOVE/AGGRESSION, a half-surreal novel about trans animosity and surreal houses. She's had short fiction appear in X-R-A-Y, BULL, JAKE, and other publications, she's the fiction editor of New Session, and she was a Lambda Literary fellow in 2024.
Jessica Martinez makes the "Get Over It, Go Out With Somebody Else" zine series which celebrates breakups using quotes from Wayne’s World. She has written and staged plays in L.A. and San Francisco, published children’s books through Khan Academy Kids, and is currently writing screenplays and a young adult novel based on her experiences growing up as a queer Latinx daydreamer in the San Gabriel Valley.
Jenny Bitner is a writer, hypnotherapist, and teacher. Her novel Here Is a Game We Could Play, published by Acre Books, is a bisexual love story with poisoning and librarians. A former staff member of the groundbreaking bisexual publication Anything That Moves, her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Sun, PANK, and The Fabulist. She is currently querying a novel about motherhood, kink, and anxiety that ponders the eternal riddle: can you have hot sex and secure, committed love at the same time?
Dominic Lim’s debut, All the Right Notes, was named a best book of 2023 by over fifteen publications, including USA Today, Goodreads, Library Journal, and Entertainment Weekly. His follow-up, , is a 2024 Amazon Editor’s Pick. Dominic is a member of the Writers Grotto and co-hosts the long-running Babylon Salon reading series in San Francisco. He holds a Master of Music from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, is an alum of Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music, and is a proud Actors’ Equity Association member. He lives in Oakland with his loving husband, Peter, and their whiny cat, Phoebe.
Celeste Chan is an artist & writer schooled by Do-It-Yourself culture and immigrant parents from Malaysia and the Bronx, NY. She co-founded Queer Rebels, toured the country with Sister Spit, and served as an Artist in Residence at SF Public Library.