Be Gay, Do Crime edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley

advance praise

"I longed to be friends with every character in these hilarious, charming, honest stories. Whenever I thought I had a story figured out, it suddenly opened into a moment of queer beauty. Crime has never been so sexy and gay." — Marie-Helene Bertino, author of BEAUTYLAND

“Funny, sharp, surprising, and bizarrely relatable, readers can’t go wrong with this entertaining and moving collection. Gay is good, and bad gays are even better.” — Marissa Higgins, author of A GOOD HAPPY GIRL

“The newest addition to the dyke aching genre, this is a desperately needed unhinged collection for the gays and theys.”— Chloé Caldwell, author of WOMEN

“Chaotic, sexy, and binge-worthy as hell, Be Gay, Do Crime is an EVENT.”— Ruth Madievsky, author of ALL NIGHT PHARMACY

"A collection that is truly firing on all cylinders. The stories are propulsive, compelling, and incredibly enthralling. Immensely enjoyable. I couldn't put it down!" — Kristen Arnett, NYT bestselling author of MOSTLY DEAD THINGS

"This irrepressible, riotous, and very gay collection of stories from some of our best emerging writers charms and entertains, leaving the reader veering in a getaway car between laugh-out-loud and gasp-out-loud."—Sarah Thankam Matthews, author of ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT

Contributor Bios

Alissa Nutting is a novelist, screenwriter, and showrunner, most recently of the Adult Swim & MAX animated series Teenage Euthanasia and the MAX original comedy Made For Love based on her New York Times Editor’s Choice novel of the same name.

Anna Dorn is the author of the novels Perfume & Pain, Exalted, and Vagablonde. Exalted was nominated for an L.A. Times Book Prize. Her next book American Spirits is forthcoming for Simon & Schuster. She lives in Los Angeles.

Aurora Mattia was born in Hong Kong and lives in Texas. Her first book, The Fifth Wound, is published by Nightboat Books. Her second book, Unsex Me Here, is published by Nightboat Books. Her stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Prairie Schooner, SPASM, Joyland, and elsewhere; and also in exhibitions at the RISD Museum and the Renaissance society, accompanying portraits by Elle Pérez. She’s working on a new novel called Seven Come Eleven, and writing some country songs.

Emily R. Austin is the author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Interesting Facts About Space, and the poetry collection, Gay Girl Prayers. She was born in Ontario, Canada, and has received two writing grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts. She studied English literature and library science at Western University. She currently lives in Ottawa, in the territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.

francesca ekwuyasi is a learner, artist and storyteller born in Lagos, Nigeria. She was awarded the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2022 for her debut novel Butter Honey Pig Bread (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020). Butter Honey Pig Bread was also shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Dublin Literary Award. Butter Honey Pig Bread placed second on CBC’s Canada Reads: Canada’s Annual Battle of the Books, where it was selected as one of five contenders in 2021 for “the one book that all of Canada should read.” She is co-author of Curious Sounds: A Dialogue in Three Movements, a multi-genre collaborative book with Roger Mooking. francesca was Queens University's 2023 Carolyn Smart Writer in Residence, her writing has appeared in the Malahat Review, Transition Magazine, Room Magazine, Brittle Paper, the Ex-Puritan, C-Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Canadian Art, Chatelain and elsewhere. Her short story Ọrun is Heaven was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the author of Helen House (Burrow Press 2022), a queer horror novelette. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle and the managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, The Rumpus, and others. She was a 2021 nonfiction fellow and a 2023 speculative fiction writer in residence at Lambda Literary's Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. She is a 2023-2024 Tin House Reading Fellow.

Maame Blue is a Ghanaian-Londoner, creative writing tutor and author of the novel Bad Love, which won the 2021 Betty Trask award, and was shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize. Her short stories have been published in Not Quite Right For Us (Flipped Eye Publishing), New Australian Fiction 2020 (Kill Your Darlings), and Joyful, Joyful (Pan Macmillan). Maame is a recipient of the 2022 Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship and was a 2022 POCC Artist-in-Residence. She contributes regularly to Royal Literary Fund publication Writers Mosaic and her writing has appeared in many places including Refinery29, The Independent and iNews. Her second novel The Rest Of You will be published by Amistad (US) and Verve Books (UK) in Autumn 2024.

Marisa (Mac) Crane is a queer, nonbinary writer. Their debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, was a January Indie Next Pick and NYT Editors' Choice. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Offing, Joyland, No Tokens, Florida Review, Passages North, Lit Hub, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and their second novel, A Sharp Endless Need, is forthcoming from Dial Press in March 2025.

Myriam Gurba is the author of several books. Her most recent essay collection, Creep: Accusations and Confessions, is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Paris Review and the Believer. She enjoys solving crossword puzzles and binge watching Real Housewives.

Myriam Lacroix was born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father, and currently lives in Vancouver. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing.

Priya Guns wrote Your Driver is Waiting.

Sam Cohen is the author of Sarahland. Her fiction also appears in Bomb, Fence, O Magazine, Electric Literature, and others.

SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels (Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award; and Blue-Skinned Gods, which was an Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), two graphic novels (Shakti and Tall Water), and one collection of short stories (The Goth House Experiment). Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and is a co-editor for Zero Street, a literary fiction series featuring LGBTQ+ authors through the University of Nebraska Press. Sindu is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. More at sjsindu.com or @sjsindu on Twitter/Instagram/Threads.

Soula Emmanuel was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Greek father. She studied at universities in Ireland and Sweden, emerging with a master’s in economic demography. In 2023, her debut novel Wild Geese was published by Footnote Press and the Feminist Press at CUNY. She currently lives on Ireland’s east coast and is working on a second novel.

Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary anti-Zionist Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, CITY OF LAUGHTER, is out now from Grove Atlantic.

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the New Yorker, NY Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction, finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award and was recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles literary prize in fiction. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, will be published January of 2024 and is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an associate professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

ABOUT THE editors

Molly Llewellyn is a twenty-something queer, disabled book blogger from the UK. She previously co-edited Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, published by Dzanc Books in 2023. She’s a big fan of "weird women" lit and anything that is the color green.

Kristel Buckley is an editor, publicist and former publisher from the Big Smoke. She is more than happy to talk your ear off about the unfaithful representation of women in history, and her passion is a more equitable, inclusive future for all stories from all voices. She lives in the UK.