In conjunction with the Rainbow Book Fair 2023, the Bureau is pleased to announce that Brian Broome, who resides in Pittsburgh, will speak at the Bureau at 3 PM, on Saturday, April 22.

BRIAN BROOME’s debut memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, is an NYT Editor’s Pick and the winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. He is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. His work has also appeared in Hippocampus, Poets and Writers, Medium, and more. Brian was a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow and an instructor in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

He has been a finalist in The Moth storytelling competition and won the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University’s Martin Luther King Writing Awards. Brian also won a VANN Award from the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation for journalism in 2019. His film, Garbage, won the Audience Choice Award at the Cortada Short Film Festival and was a semi-finalist in the Portland Short Fest. Brian is a 2022 Writer in Residence at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California.

Copies of Punch Me Up to the Gods (Mariner Books, 2022, paperback, $17.99) will be available for sale and signing by the author. To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “Please reserve Punch Me Up to the Gods” in the subject line.

Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

More about the Rainbow Book Fair:

The New York Rainbow Book Fair, the largest lgbtq+ book event in the US, will resume once more on Saturday, April 22, from Noon to 6 PM, at The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center, 208 W. 13th Street in the West Village, after a 2-year absence due to Covid-19. The theme of this year’s fair is WEIRD AND QUEER. Showing close to 100 exhibitors with books ranging from kids’ to seniors, this book fair highlights the range, depth, and quality of queer books, their authors, and most importantly, their readers. The popularity of the Rainbow Book Fair shows that books are NOT dead. At all.

Along with an array of books in two large rooms at the Center, the Fair will also host its famous Poetry Salon, curated by Nathaniel Siegel, giving a showcase to close to 50 poets reading briefly, and of course, being poets, talking to each other seriously (but fun, too! Yeah.)

There will also be short readings by 30 authors, and Featured Readings by Curtis Chin, author of the memoir Everything I Learned I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant (Little Brown); Brian Broome, Pittsburgh author of the landmark memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods (Mariner Books), chosen by the NY Times as one of the “100 Notable Books of the Year,” winner Kirkus Non-Fiction Book Award; and West Coast author Felice Picano—The Lure, The Joy of Gay Sex, Like People in History — an original member of the famous Lavender Quill group that included Andrew Holleran and Edmund White.

Plus, exciting panels all day explore queer books and their authors in depth. They include “Weird and Queer: Sci-Fi, Gothic, Horror, and Memoir”; “Librarians and Archivists: Fighting Back Against the Attacks on Queer Books”; “Queering Comics”; and “Queer Histories.” There will also be showcases for outstanding lgbtq+ publishers, including Archer Books, Rebel Satori, and Riverdale Avenue Books.

The Rainbow Book Fair is free to attend, but a voluntary $3 donation is asked at the door. For more information on the RBF, go to rainbowbookfair.com, or rainbowbookfair123@gmail.com; or belhuepress@earthlink.net.