Megan Volpert, author of Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear, has been nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year awards in the “specialty” category! We look forward to the winners list with fingers crossed!
Megan was nominated and won in 2020 for her essay collection, Boss Broad.
A spectrum of thanks to Jonathan Kemp and queerguru for the glowing review of CLOSET CASES: Queers on What We Wear by Megan Volpert, up today!
Kemp says, "These are tender, painful, playful testimonies to the power and importance of clothes for queers. . . .From the significance of a flashy tie being worn in a classroom to the sexual semiotics of lesbian body hair, from leather man drag to cowboy boots – the topics are as diverse as the queers depicted in the photos wearing the item of clothing or outfit being written about. . . . Fashion becomes crucial in the expression of or experimentation with the ‘self’ in all its radical complexity and its paradoxical and often contradictory gestures. The selves on proud display here are all hard-won: if our bodies are battlefields then what we wear is sometimes battle dress . . .”
Image of Et Alia Press Director Erin Wood by Cary Jenkins/Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“A shipment of Sarah-Catherine Gutierrez's new book But First Save 10: The One Simple Money Move That Will Change Your Life was on the way to Et Alia Press one afternoon early in July and publisher Erin Wood was preparing for the onslaught.
"We've got 650 pounds of books coming today," she says. "My daughter is going to be helping put return address labels on all the packages and my husband is printing the address labels in his office."
“This is how things are run at Et Alia, the ambitious, Little Rock-based ‘small press for big voices’ that has published memoirs, children's books, anthologies, poetry, books on fashion, nature and Wood's award-winning 2019 collection of interviews and photography "Women Make Arkansas: Conversations With 50 Creatives," which also spawned the annual Women Make Arkansas Market.
“In the past five or six years, I've really wanted to make this a full-time thing," Wood, 42, says during a telephone interview. "It also became really clear to me that if you were going to publish three to five books a year, why not make them in Arkansas? This is my native state, and we've got lots of stories to tell.
“Georgia author Megan Volpert edited Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear, which was published by Et Alia in March.
"‘I see Erin at the forefront of this new South we are all trying to build together, something that is a little more progressive, a little more diverse," Volpert says. "If you look at the types of writers she's publishing, it's a very diverse bunch and it's mostly women. She gets a lot credit for being a small, one-woman operation, but not a lot of people look at the very quiet and useful way that her selections have been political.’"
To read the rest of the article by Sean Clancy, CLICK HERE.
Thank you to Linda Levitt and PopMatters for a glowing review of Closet Cases by Megan Volpert, featuring the words of Gerard Wozek, Max Voltage, Desmond is Amazing, Tig Kashala, Mindy Dawn Friedman, and Uzo Ejikeme!
"Central to Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear is that we are what we wear. The identities we project and the identities we aspire to are communicated to others through our choices in self-presentation. . . .
"With its perfect 8.5" x 8.5" square design and dynamic, art quality photographs, it would be easy to consider Closet Cases as a coffee table book. But coffee table books are delightful to thumb through solely for their visual appeal, and typically don't include engaging personal essays like those that complement each photograph in Closet Cases."
Read the full review HERE.
ABOUT:
Jean jackets can be armor. Bracelets, spiritual totems. Belts can save lives, or take them.
As a verb, "fashion" is exceedingly queer. Our queer community learns to fashion identity from and through the clothes we wear, the costumes we choose, the fabrics we desire—and the statements these make. No other community allows clothing to serve as such a primary, dominant marker of subjectivity, both individually and collectively. We don’t simply permit fashioning; we rely upon what we put on our bodies to tip off, to signal, and to serve as evidence of who we are.
This is much more than a “fashion book.” It is a collection of artifacts that testifies to the power of fashion as a verb as it unfolds the complex and lovely strategies governing what we do in the LGBTQ+ community to build authentic selves that are both comfortable and seen.
8.5 x 8.5. Standard color. 176 pages. Features the images and words of 75 contributors. ISBN: 978-1-944528-06-5
