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

James Hannaham, Kalup Linzy, and PEN Tulsa put on a joyous celebration of queerness and free expression.

Queen Rose Art House hosted this evening of dancing and community with MC’ing by Kalup Linzy and DJ’ing by DJ Kylie. 

Together, we celebrated James Hannaham’s heralded queer novel Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, a 2023 Lambda Literary Award nominee in Transgender Fiction and New York Times 100 Notable Book of 2022. Attendees gained insight into how to push back against the recent LGBTQ-focused book bans, while also taking part in a joyous dance party.

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.

participants

James 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.

Kalup Linzy is an American video and performance artist. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, a Creative Capital Foundation grant, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, an Art Matters Grant, The Headlands Center for the Arts Alumni Awards Residency, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Film and Video, and is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow. He is best known work for a series of politically charged videos that satirize the conventions of the television soap opera. His work has been included in exhibitions Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Prospect.1 New Orleans, 30 Americans, Rubell Family Collection, MoMA PS1 Greater New York, At Home/Not At Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. His work can also be found in the public collections at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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