Join authors Valena Beety, Maryam Ahranjani, Libby Adler, and Hugh Ryan for a night of personal histories through the queer 90s, from the US to Cuba, into the working place for women in criminal law, and landing at the criminalization of queer people today. We’ll tie these threads together for a wide-ranging discussion on what gender and identity mean in different places and times, how we can be marginalized and silenced, and what we can do to speak up and not be erased.

RSVP TO THIS EVENT

—

A former federal prosecutor, Valena Beety is the McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington Maurer School of Law and a co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project. The author of Manifesting Justice and Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity (The New Press), she lives in Indiana.

Maryam Ahranjani is an experienced law professor at the University of New Mexico (UNM), where she teaches in the areas of constitutional, criminal, and education law. She is also a textbook author, rule of law and human rights consultant, program manager and evaluator, and curriculum designer. She is the editor of Women in Criminal Law: A Guide for Inclusive and Thriving Workplaces. Her newest work, Governing the Terrain Called Beauty: The Queerness of Political Economy in Cuba and the United States, releases in July.

Libby Adler is Professor of Law and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform (2018) as well as numerous articles on lgbtq legal issues. She serves as a commissioner on the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth.

Hugh Ryan is a writer, historian, and curator in New York City. With the multi-talented Peppermint, he is also the host of Queer History 101, the bookclub & podcast from Allstora.com.

His most recent book, THE WOMEN’S HOUSE OF DETENTION: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, is a queer history of the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village. It is the story of one building: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired. It is the winner of the 2023 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Award for Nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle of the American Library Association, as well as the 2022 Warren Johansson Award from the W.A. Percy Foundation.