Book Talk: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore - TERRY DACTYL - with Jennifer Natalya Fink

Watch author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

From iconic author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore comes a breathless search for intimacy and connection, ranging from club culture to the art world, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19.

Terry Dactyl has lived many lives. Raised by boisterous lesbian mothers in Seattle, she comes of age as a trans girl in the 1980s in a world of dancing queens and late-night house parties just as the AIDS crisis ravages their world. After moving to New York City, Terry finds a new family among gender-bending club kids bonded by pageantry and drugs, fiercely loyal and unapologetic. She lands a job at a Soho gallery, where, after partying all night, she spends her days bringing club culture to the elite art world.

Twenty years later, in a panic during the COVID-19 lockdown, Terry returns to a Seattle stifled by gentrification and pandemic isolation until resistance erupts following the murder of George Floyd, and her search for community ignites once again.

In propulsive, intoxicating prose, Terry Dactyl traces an extraordinary journey from adolescence to adulthood, delivering a vital portrait of queer identity in all its peril and possibility.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of seven books, and the editor of six anthologies. Her most recent title, Touching the Art, was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her previous title, The Freezer Door, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Her new novel is Terry Dactyl.

Bernstein Sycamore is in conversation with Jennifer Natalya Fink is a professor of English and core faculty in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of seven books, including All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship. Fink is the winner of the Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction and the Dana Award for the Novel. Watch for her new novel, A Mischief, coming in 2027, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore for Bunny Presse (an imprint of Fonograph Editions).

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Politics and Prose is a beloved and award-winning staple for book lovers around the nation's capital and the world. In addition to our incredible selection of titles, Politics and Prose offers public book talks with today's leading authors and journalists.

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