Katie Gilmartin

Katie Gilmartin's checkered past includes stints as a buoyant union organizer, bona fide sex researcher, and deeply engaged college professor. She attended Oberlin College and Yale Graduate School, where her doctoral research entailed interviewing older lesbians about their lives in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Their life stories have haunted her since, and inspired her new novel. For over a decade Katie taught cultural studies. On an urgent quest to relocate pleasure, she took up printmaking and became utterly smitten. She surrendered her academic life to assume care of Chrysalis Print Studio, where she now teaches linocut and monotype classes. Blackmail, My Love, is illustrated with her linocut prints. Along the way she founded the Queer Ancestors Project, which is devoted to forging sturdy relationships between young LGBTQ people and their ancestors.