A proud resident of Los Angeles for three decades, Joseph Allen Boone is the author of the queer coming-of-age novel Furnace Creek (2022) and the story collection Conditions of Precarity (2024), and he will be reading excerpts from both books. An award-winning professor of English at the University of Southern California, he is also the author of the groundbreaking The Homoerotics of Orientalism (2015), among many other works of non-fiction.

Michael Cunningham writes that Furnace Creek “is a genuine accomplishment,’ Colm Toíbín calls the novel “ingenious,” and Viet Nguyen comments that he was “totally entertained and most of all seduced” by its “sweeping tale of sex, race, and a young man’s education.” T. C. Boyle has lauded the “exquisitely wrought stories” and “remarkable” range of characters in the collection Conditions of Precarity, which Peter Gadol calls “an atlas of longing and desire.”  Learn more at Joseph Allen Boone.