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Saturday, June 24, 2023, at 2:00 PM
Tickets are $12 General and $10 Members
Renowned author and scholar discusses her 2022 Vanity Fair article about her transition with author and Professor Jason S. Wrench.
“Changing genders was a strange and electric idea that had lived somewhere in the recesses of my mind for the better part of my 67 years…My desire to live as a woman, I could see now, was a coherent phenomenon, consistently just under the surface of my nominal life for all those decades, despite my best efforts to pretend it wasn’t there.” These are the words of Lucy Sante from an article she wrote for Vanity Fair in 2022 in which she describes the process of her transition to the literary world who had known her as Luc Sante during her long, illustrious literary career.
Lucy Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium, lived in New York City for almost thirty years, and now lives in the Hudson Valley. She is the author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs, and editor and translator of Novels in Three Lines. Her memoir I Heard Her Call My Name will be published by Penguin in February. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. She taught in Columbia University’s MFA writing programs and recently retired after 24 years teaching writing and the history of photography at Bard College.
Considering the recent increase in attention to transgender issues, unfortunately with an explosion of anti-trans legislation in some areas of the country as well as an increase in violence against trans individuals, the producer of the Prosendale series decided that a thoughtful and sensitive program about transgender issues could offer the public a deeper understanding of these issues with hopefully, an increase in compassion and a decrease in fear and prejudice. It was with this goal in mind that Joyce Sprafkin, Ph.D., a retired clinical psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychiatry from Stony Brook Medical School, invited Lucy Sante to be honored as the sole author to be featured at this Prosendale event for Pride Month.
Dr. Wrench is a professor in the Department of Communication at SUNY New Paltz. He has authored or edited twenty academic books, thirty-five plus research articles, numerous chapters in other books, and six novels published by Pride Publishing (part of the Totally Entwined Group). His four-book series, Up on the Farm, is set in the Hudson Valley. Book four in that series, Catching the Composer, came out in May 2023. Book one, Boy Bands and Bullets, in his new Love and Liquidation trilogy comes out in November 2023. As a novelist, he is a mentor and active member of the Romance Writers of America.
The program is generously sponsored by The Golden Notebook in Woodstock, which will be selling copies of Lucy’s most recent book, Nineteen Reservoirs, at the event.