City Lights in conjunction with Semiotext(e) presents
The Dopamine Variety Show
Hosted by Michelle Tea
with Vera Blossom, Clement Goldberg, Brooke Palmieri, Naz Riahi, Shawn Stewart Ruff, and L Scully
City Lights celebrates the launch of a thrilling new publishing endeavor!
DOPAMINE is a queer literary organization that aims to elevate LGBTQI+ writing and writers through publishing, reading series, literary tours, and workshops. DOPAMINE is dedicated to stylistic stories of unvarnished queer existence.
DOPAMINE works closely with influential indie publisher Semiotext(e), in whose footsteps they follow. This literary friendship allows DOPAMINE to focus on their creative raison d’etre while being guided through the nuts-and-bolts of publishing.
Join City Lights as it celebrates the publication of two new books
The Sluts Anthology – Edited by Michelle Tea
and
New Mistakes – By Clement Goldberg
About the participants
Vera Blossom is a proud Filipina American and transfemme monster. Her work explores desire, pleasure, gender, and death. She writes the steamy, confessional newsletter How to Fuck Like a Girl, and cofounded Snack Report, a food blog focused on rituals, feelings, and friendship. In 2021, she helped produce Black Mountain Radio, an artist-driven audio project published in collaboration with Black Mountain Institute and The Believer magazine. In 2022, she was associate producer on season 2 of The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, which focused on the disinformation ecosystem constructed by the Christian Nationalist movement. In 2023, she was selected as an Ann Friedman Weekly Fellow and a PEN America Emerging Voice.
Clement Goldberg is an award-winning artist, writer, director and animator. They work across multiple disciplines to create satirical yet hopeful projects that center collective grief rooted in climate crisis, cultural erasure, and extinction. Clement’s film Let Me Let You Go received a 2022 Creative Capital Award.
Brooke Palmieri is an artist, writer, and educator working at the intersection of memory, history, and gender-bending alternate realities. In 2018 they founded CAMP BOOKS (http://campbooks.biz ), a platform and travelling bookshop promoting access to queer history through cheap prints and zines; workshops and installations; and the collaborative construction of archives related to LGBTQIA+ activism and the long history of gender non-conformity. Their writing has recently been featured in anthologies by Pilot Press and Sticky Fingers Publishing, and their work has been exhibited at Gaada, the Glasgow Women’s Library, The Bower, and Chelsea Space. From September to November 2023 they were the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Huntington, working on a piece of creative non-fiction about witchcraft, class, and gender non-conformity: Bargain Witch, forthcoming in Autumn 2025 with DOPAMINE Books.
Naz Riahi is an Iranian writer, filmmaker, and performer. Her work explores the spaces, opportunities, and humor of outsiderness, informed by her experiences as an immigrant. Her essays and stories have been published in A Public Space, Harper’s Bazaar, Food & Wine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Longreads, Catapult, the Fader, Guernica, and more. Riahi holds an MFA from the New School and is the recipient of a fellowship at Yaddo and a NYFA City Artist Corps Grant.
Shawn Stewart Ruff is the author of three novels, including Finlater, 2008 winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction and a finalist for the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award. He is also the editor of the landmark Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Fiction by African American Writers (1996).
L Scully (they/them) is a trans writer and double Capricorn currently based in the ether. Their debut full-length book, Fuck Me: A Memoir, is available from Gnashing Teeth Publishing as of April 2023 and their poetry collection, self-romancing, is forthcoming from Michelle Tea’s DOPAMINE press in 2025. L’s chapbooks, Like Us and I00 I Love Yous, are available from ELJ Editions and Ethel, respectively. They have recently completed their first bicoastal book tour, and have work appearing internationally in the UK’s WORMS Mag, the Dutch Simulacrum Magazine, and Finnish publication Almanac Press’s Journal of Trans Poetics, among others. They have been invited to residencies nationally and internationally and have recently participated as an artist in residence at The Dylan Thomas Summer School in Wales, La Barre Artist Residency in France, and The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow, Eureka Springs, Arkansas. As cofounder of Stone of Madness Press, L has sought to create a digital space to uplift queer, trans, and neurodivergent writers.
Michelle Tea is the author of over twenty books for grown-ups, teenagers and children. Her autofiction Valencia is a cult classic that was made into a feature length art film. Her tarot how-to, Modern Tarot, is a best-seller, and her essay collection Against Memoir was awarded the PEN/America Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for The Art of the Essay. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. Tea was the founding Executive Director of Bay Area arts organization RADAR Productions for thirteen years; her final act as ED was to create Drag Queen Story Hour, for which she has received honors from The California Library Association and Logo Television. Tea is also the co-founder of the legendary Sister Spit, a performance tour which has been active since its inception in 1997.
To learn more about DOPAMINE visit this link.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation