Lucy Sante with Stacey Levine

Lucy Sante visits the store to celebrate I Heard Her Call My Name. Her memoir traces a life spent pursuing a dream of artistic truth while evading the truth of her own gender identity, until, finally, she turned to face who she really was. Local author and friend of the store, Stacey Levine, will join Lucy onstage. A marvel of grace and empathy, I Heard Her Call My Name parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, of gender identity and far beyond. For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, to drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates, on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life a performance. She was presenting a façade, even to herself. Sante’s memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative: the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. Sante brings a loving irony to her account of her unsteady first steps; there was much she found she still needed to learn about being a woman after some sixty years cloaked in a man’s identity, in a man’s world. Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy Award (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She recently retired after twenty-four years teaching at Bard College. Stacey Levine is the author of two novels, Dra— and Frances Johnson, and two story collections, My Horse and Other Stories and The Girl with Brown Fur. A former freelancer for the Seattle Times and The Stranger, her fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Santa Monica Review, Yeti, and other venues. She was a recipient of a Stranger Genius Literature Award and a PEN Award for fiction. Her new novel, Mice 1961, will be published in March 2024.

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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2235928-0

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