Six finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards will read from their nominated work. Tonight's readers are James Morrison, Stacie Cassarino, Kathleen Bradean, Dexter Flowers, Ariel Schrag, and Dayle A. Dermatis.

James Morrison is the author of a memoir, Broken Fever (2001), a novel, The Lost Girl (2007), and a collection of short stories, Said and Done (2009), as well as several books on film.  He lives in Southern California and teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

Stacie Cassarino is a recipient of the "Discovery"/The Nation prize, the Audre Lorde Award, the Astraea Foundation Writer’s Fund, a finalist for the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and nominee twice for the Pushcart Prize. She has worked as a chef, and has held teaching positions at Middlebury College, Pratt Institute, and now UCLA where she's working towards her Ph.D. She lives in Venice, CA.

Award winning author Kathleen Bradean’s stories can be found in The Best of Best Women’s EroticaThe Sweetest Kiss (Cleis), The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 9 (Running Press), Zane’s Sensuality – Caramel Flava II (Atria), Broadly Bound (Phaze), Where the Girls Are (Cleis), Coming Together Against the Odds (Coming Together), and Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades (Lethe Press). She blogs weekly for Oh Get A Grip, and reviews erotica monthly at EroticaRevealed.Com and  Erotica-Readers.Com. 2010 (Cleis),

Dexter Flowers is a Portland writer, who started her writing career as an eighth grade advice columnist.  Since then she's busted out in the 2007 national Sister Spit tour and is published in the anthologies Baby Remember My Name, It's So You  both edited by Michelle Tea, and Portland Queer, edited by Ariel Gore, which is Lammy-nominated in the Anthology category.  She's been a featured reader at the San Francisco library's RADAR reading series, and is a frequent personality on KBOO free radio.

Ariel Schrag is the author of the autobiographical graphic novels Awkward, Definition, Potential, and Likewise, which chronicle her four years at Berkeley High School. Potential is currently being developed into a feature film with director Rose Troche. Schrag was also a writer for the hit Showtime series The L Word.

An interviewer said of Dayle A. Dermatis, “She has so many aliases, you’d think she was a spy!” Under her Andrea Dale pseudonym, she’s sold approximately 50 erotic stories, two of which are in 2010 Lamba Award-nominated anthologies. Tonight she will be reading “Queens Up” which appeared in Lesbian Cowboys: Erotic Adventures.