Didn’t Nobody Give a S*** What Happened to Carlotta: The Reading

PEN Tulsa and Fulton Street Books and Coffee collaborated for a reading and book signing with award-winning author James Hannaham. Hannaham is the author of the novels God Says No, a Stonewall Book Award finalist, and Delicious Foods, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist as well as a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in Brooklyn, where he teaches at the Pratt Institute.

James Hannaham’s Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta follows a trans woman reentering life outside after more than twenty years in a men’s prison. Written with the same astonishing verve of Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and readers alike, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce’s Ulysses does through Dublin. The novel sings with brio and ambition, delivering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.

Copies of Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta were available for purchase.

About James Hannaham

James Hannaham is a writer, performer, and visual artist. His novel Delicious Foods, which deals with human trafficking, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was named one of Publishers Weekly’s top ten books of the year. The New York Times called it an “ambitious, sweeping novel of American captivity and exploitation.”

He studied art at Yale University and, in 1992, began working in the art department of The Village Voice while also writing for the paper. Later he studied creative writing at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His debut novel, God Says No, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He has published fiction in One Story, Fence, StoryQuarterly, and BOMB. He reviews theater and art for 4Columns.

He co-founded the New York City–based performance group Elevator Repair Service and worked with them 1992–2002. His text-based artworks often satirize the theoretical jargon that is used to describe visual art; his 2014 gallery show “Card Tricks” consisted of descriptive placards for fictive artworks, with titles such as “Planet” and “Nothing.”

In 2020 his work Everything Is Normal, Everything Is Normal, Everything Is Fine, Everything Is Fine was judged Best in Show at a national juried exhibition of artist books and text-based visual works, Biblio Spectaculum.

Hannaham is a professor in the writing program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. His most recently published work is the 2022 novel Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta.

About Fulton Street Books & Coffee

Fulton Street Books and Coffee aims to increase intergenerational literacy and build a better community. Fulton Street is a space to call home. It is a space to build community and to change Tulsa through civic discourse. It is a space on a mission to increase literacy, with people at the center of all the work that they do. It is a space for coffee, books, and a good time. At Fulton Street, they center the stories, narratives and lived experiences of people of color and marginalized communities.

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