Queer Haunts & Hauntings: Readings from C. Russell Price & Dale Corvino In-Person

Reading from their latest works, C. Russell Price and Dale Corvino will open the floor to discussions of queer haunts and hauntings, sex work, longing, desire, and whatever else enters the room. Bisquick: An American Seance Grief work is a rodeo filled with ghost clowns. Exploring Spiritualism and the fetishization of the midwest cowboy aesthetic, Price tackles the intersectionality of class, sexuality, and gender with their cinematic eye and beat-married ear. Rooted in research of the leather BDSM community and seances, Price runs from the hyper-fabulist to the anti-elegiac with neck breaking speed creating a world inhabited by just three characters: the speaker, Ghost Cowboy (a class warfare instigating ghost with substance issues), and Bisquick (a blue horse, also a ghost). Bisquick: An American Seance is a hot, slow dance playlist for those in a triangulation of desire that leaves you gasping: I hope there’s a horse in this poem; O! here it comes. Afterlife of a Kept Boy Afterlife of a Kept Boy has been in the making for decades—the earliest cited diary entries date from 1986. The account of the author's entanglements with a British society decorator in 80’s New York City holds to solar time—regular, relentless, like the fixated gaze of the decorator. How he dismantled that kept label is recounted in phases, holding to lunar time. AoaKB opens the door to conversations about agency, longing, and representations of sex work in culture, with implicit demands for decriminalization and bodily autonomy for all. C. Russell Price is the author of oh, you thought this was a date?!: Apocalypse Poems (Northwestern University Press) and Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other (Sibling Rivalry Press). Their next collection Bisquick: An American Seance will be published in August 2026. They work with Story Studio Chicago, the Ragdale Foundation, the Poetry Center of Chicago, and The Anarchist Review of Books. They are a Lambda Fellow, Ragdale Fellow, and two time top 50 writers of Chicago honoree. Price is a genderqueer punk landscaper and floral installation artist in Chicago. A 2021 Lambda Fellow, Dale Corvino’s essays have appeared in Salon, the Rumpus, and the Gay & Lesbian Review. Bonds & Boundaries, his debut short story collection, was published in 2023 by Rebel Satori Press. His memoir of sex work, Afterlife of a Kept Boy, won the C&R Press Nonfiction Prize and was released in March 2025. Corvino lives in New York City with his super understanding husband.