The Six Bridges Book Festival (formerly the Arkansas Literary Festival) is normally enjoyed by thousands in Central Arkansas at the end of April. Due to concerns surrounding COVID-19, the 2020 Festival is postponed until fall.
Seven Arkansas contributors are featured in Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear, an anthology by Atlanta author Megan Volpert, which will be part of the Festival. Those contributors include Jane V. Blunshi, Jordan Butler, Claire Comeaux, M Shelly Connor, Tig Kashala, Kate Leland, and Randi M. Romo.
Volpert shares, “Jean jackets can be armor. Bracelets, spiritual totems. Belts can save lives, or take them. As a verb, ‘fashion’ is exceedingly queer. Our queer community learns to fashion identity from and through the clothes we wear, the costumes we choose, the fabrics we desire—and the statements these make. No other community allows clothing to serve as such a primary, dominant marker of subjectivity, both individually and collectively.
“We don’t simply permit fashioning; we rely upon what we put on our bodies to tip off, to signal, and to serve as evidence of who we are. This is much more than a ‘fashion book.’ It is a collection of artifacts that testifies to the power of fashion as a verb as it unfolds the complex and lovely strategies governing what we do in the LGBTQ+ community to build authentic selves that are both comfortable and seen.”
This 8.5 x 8.5 color paperback has 176 pages and is available for order through at www.etaliapress.com with free shipping as well as through local and national booksellers.
A Hot Springs native, Erin Wood is a writer, editor, and publisher in Little Rock. She owns and runs Et Alia Press (etaliapress.com). Wood is author of Women Make Arkansas: Conversations With 50 Creatives (April, 2019) and editor of and a contributor to Scars: An Anthology (2015).
