About

In conversation with playwright Julia Jarcho, writer and performer Tom Cole launches his first book. The incessant and irritating clang of an out-of-town neighbor’s outdoor wind chime punctuates our narrator’s humorous and obsessive self-examinations. His recounts of shame, addiction, and self-destructive behavior swells and snowballs, taking us through the highs and lows of queer reality today. With Julia Jarcho, author of Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism, the two writers will discuss ideas of process, performance, and the environment that brought Chimes to fruition. Copies of the book will be available for purchase. The event will be followed by a signing. Tom Cole is a writer, performer, and artist living between the Lower East Side and Kingston, NY. His work has been presented at Partici­pant Inc, Thread Waxing Space, Art on Air, Dixon Place, Clock­tower Gallery, ICA Boston, Performa, Howl Arts, Poetry Project, and the Boston Center for the Arts. He is a three-time MacDowell Playwriting fellow, and an Edward Albee Foundation Playwriting fellow. Cole’s writing has been anthologized in Pathetic Litera­ture, edited by Eileen Myles; Sluts, edited by Michelle Tea; Flesh and the Word 4, edited by Michael Lowenthal; This New Breed, edited by Rudy Kikel, and Flashpoint, edited by Michael Bronski. His first book, Chimes: A Monologue, will be released by The Song Cave in fall 2026. Julia Jarcho is a playwright and theater artist and a scholar of literature, theater, and critical theory. Her work across disciplines tends to focus on fantasies about writing itself, often in relation to pleasure, violence, and theatrical performance. She is the author of Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism (University of Chicago, 2024) and Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2017), as well as the collection Minor Theater: Three Plays (53rd State, 2017). Her play Grimly Handsome won a 2013 Obie Award for Best New American Play. She got her PhD in Rhetoric at the University of California Berkeley and has taught in the department of English at NYU and in the TAPS department at Brown, where she directed the MFA program in Playwriting. She is now a Professor in the Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies department at Yale. The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is Manhattan’s only queer bookstore, located on the second floor of the LGBT Center. We’re open Tuesday-Sunday from 1-7pm and accessible by the 6th Ave 1 2 3 L trains and 8th Ave A C E trains. Our cafe, The Bureau Cafe, is open Tuesday-Sunday from 9am-7pm.

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