Sarah Schulman Speaker & Booking Information

Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright and lesbian rights activist. Schulman is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at College of Staten Island and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.

Her first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story was published in 1984, followed by GIRLS, VISIONS and EVERYTHING and After Delores was published by E. P. Dutton in 1988 and received a rave review in The New York Times, was translated into eight languages, and was awarded an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award in 1989. This was followed by PEOPLE IN TROUBLE, the first novel about AIDS activism. Empathy is an experimental novel about lesbian existence. Her next novel, RAT BOHEMIA received a full page rave review in the New York Times from Edmund White, and was named one of the 100 best LGBT books by The Publishing Triangle.Shimmer was set in New York City during the McCarthy era and features a black male protagonist and a white lesbian protagonist. My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During The Reagan/Bush Years is a collection of journalism that begins before Reagan's election in 1980 and provides ongoing coverage of the AIDS crisis began. Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, which won the Stonewall Book Award, argues that significant plot elements of the successful 1996 musical Rent were lifted from People in Trouble. The heterosexual plot of Rent is based on the opera La Bohème, while the gay plot is similar to the plot of Schulman's novel. Schulman never sued, but analyzed in Stagestruck the way the musical depicted AIDS and gay people, in contrast to work made by those communities that same year. THE CHILD, a controversial novel about a sexual relationship between a forty-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old boy, was published by Carroll and Graff and republished by Arsenal Pulp Press. Arsenal also did an anniversary critical edition of Empathy with articles by Kevin Killian and John Weir was published by Arsenal Pulp in 2007, followed by a new edition of Rat Bohemia in spring 2008, with a cover by Nan Goldin. And a 25th anniversary edition of AFTER DELORES in 2013. In 2009, Arsenal Pulp published her ninth novel, The Mere Future, a futuristic dystopia about a New York City in which the only remaining career is marketing. The paperback appeared in 2011 and Audible issued the audio book in 2014. Also in 2011, The New Press published Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. In 2012 and was released in Audio book in 2014, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, was published by the University of California Press and Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, was published by Duke University Press in 2013. With these she received her 9th and 10th Lambda literary award nominations. Schulman was named one of Publisher Weekly's 60 Most Underrated Writers, Slate called The Gentrification of the Mind one of the 10 Best Most Unknown Books and GalleyCat called it one of the Best Unrecognized Books of the year. She has been awarded a Guggenheim in Playwrighting, A Fulbright in Judaic Studies The Kessler Award for Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies, 3 NY Foundation for the Art Fellowships and a number of other awards. Her new novel The Cosmopolitans, set in Greenwich Village in 1958, is forthcoming from The Feminist Press in March, 2011.

From 1979-1994 she had 15 plays produced in the context of the avant garde "Downtown Arts Movement" based in New York City's East Village. Venues included The University of the Streets, PS 122, La Mama, King Tut Wah-Wah Hut, The Pyramid Club, 8BC, Franklin Furnace, The Kitchen, Ela Troyano and Uzi Parness' Club Chandelier, Here, the Performing Garage, and others. Schulman was admitted into the Sundance Theater Lab in 2001 with the play Carson McCullers. The workshop starred Angelina Phillips and Bill Camp and was directed by Craig Lucas. The play had its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2002, directed by Marion McClinton and starring Jenny Bacon. Carson McCullers has been published by Playscripts Inc. This was followed by a commission from South Coast Repertory for which she wrote two plays: Made in Korea, based on the memoirs of Mi Ok Bruining, and Mercy. Both plays were presented in several readings and workshops. In 2001, Schulman won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwrighting. In 2005, Tim Sanford, artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, produced Manic Flight Reaction. Director Trip Cullman developed the work at New York Stage and Film, and it opened at Playwrights that winter, starring Deirdre O'Connell with Molly Price, Jessica Collins, Austin Lysy, Michael Esper and Angel Desai. Schulman secured the rights to write an adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story, which premiered at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in 2007, directed by Jiri Ziska. It later had a New York reading at New York Theater Workshop, directed by Jo Bonney.