Please join Zenith Bookstore on Thursday, August 28th at 7 PM as we welcome award-winning local author and gender specialist Alex Iantaffi. Alex will be in conversation with Duluth writer Stuart Getty. They will discuss Alex’s books, share valuable insight and answer the audience’s questions. They will specifically highlight Alex’s most recent books, How to Understand Your Relationships: A Practical Guide (Jessica Kingsley Publishers) and Trans & Disabled: An Anthology of Identities and Experiences (Jessica Kingsley Publishers). Books will be available for signing and to purchase.
In How to Understand Your Relationships: A Practical Guide, Alex Iantaffi and co-author MJ Barker discuss what it means when we say 'relationship'. How do we separate our needs and desires from norms and expectations? How can we approach our relationships with mutuality, care and compassion? This down-to-earth guide is the ultimate companion for anybody who wants to examine their place in the world -- how we relate to ourselves, and others.
Trans & Disabled: An Anthology of Identities and Experiences brings together vulnerable stories, poems, plays, drawings, and personal essays. To be trans and disabled means to have experienced harassment, discrimination, loneliness, often poverty, to have struggled with feeling unworthy of love. To be trans and disabled means experiencing ableism within our trans communities and transphobia within our disabled communities. To be trans and disabled means to love our fellow trans and disabled people harder than we could ever love ourselves.
Alex Iantaffi, PhD, MS, SEP, CST, CST-S, LMFT (they/he) is an award-winning author, family therapist, WPATH certified gender specialist, AASECT certified sex therapist, Somatic ExperiencingⓇ practitioner, clinical supervisor and mentor. They have researched, presented, and published extensively on gender, disability, sexuality, trauma, spirituality, and relationships. They are a conditionally white, trans masculine, nonbinary, bi queer, polyamorous, disabled, neurodivergent, Italian immigrant with citizenship privilege, and a parent who has been living on Dakota and Anishinaabe territories, currently known as Minnesota since 2008. Alex is the author of numerous books. They also host the podcast Gender Stories and the new YouTube series Warm Take Wednesdays with Dr. Alex Iantaffi.
Stuart Getty (they/them) is a writer, design director, gender educator, filmmaker and ritualist — at the heart of everything they do is finding soul and meaning in every story. They are currently a Senior Design Director and writer at IDEO, a global design consultant, and help lead the company’s Inclusive Design practice. They are also a published author - How to They/Them and have spent years traveling to schools, companies, and groups to teach about gender. Stuart lives in Duluth, and calls Chester Creek their daily holy sanctuary. They also joke they are in a three-way marriage with their wife and the great mother, Lake Superior.
Please note: At the author’s request, this will be a masked event. There will be masks available at the door.