New Amble Press Author Signings

Amble Press welcomes a host of new authors to our publishing family.

MATTHEW CLARK DAVISON is a writer and educator living in San Francisco. He is the creator and teacher of The Lab: Writing Classes with MCD, a non-academic school started in 2007 in a friend’s living room on Douglass Street. 10+ Years/20+ Cycles/120+ Sessions/140+ Writers & Artists Studied/200+ Labbers/4 Locations/ & 1,000s of pages of stories later, The Lab is still going strong. He earned a BA and MFA in Creative Writing from SFSU, where he now teaches full-time in the BA/MA/MFA departments. Matthew served as the Chief Artistic Strategist at Performing Arts Workshop, where he worked for eleven years as a teaching artist and as a mentor to newly-hired teaching artists who bring intensive residencies in various art forms to children who may not otherwise receive an arts education. He has also coached writing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and continues to coach established and aspiring writers on their creative manuscripts.

His prose has been recently anthologized in Empty The Pews (Epiphany Publishing) and 580-Split; and published in or on Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Foglifter, Lumina Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Per Contra, Educe, and others; and has been recognized with a Creative Work Grant, (Inaugural Awardee/San Francisco State University), Cultural Equities Grant (San Francisco Arts Commission), Clark Gross Award for a Novel-in-Progress, and a Stonewall Alumni Award.

Courses taught at SFSU include MFA Process in Creative Nonfiction, Characterization, Short Story Writing, Uses of Personal Experience, Directed Writing (a one-on-one tutorial), Writers on Writing, Craft of Fiction, Style in Fiction, The Short-Short Story, Works In Progress, Personal Narrative, Teaching Creative Writing, Transfer Literary Magazine, and Fourteen Hills.

Amble Press will be publishing his debut novel, Doubting Thomas in summer 2021.

JOE OKONKWO is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and editor. His debut novel Jazz Moon, set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance and glittering Jazz Age Paris, won the Publishing Triangle’s prestigious 2016 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction.

Joe’s short stories have appeared in Promethean, Penumbra, Cooper Street, Storychord, LGBTsr.org, Chelsea Station, and Shotgun Honey. His work has been anthologized in Love Stories from Africa (his first fiction published outside the U.S.), Best Gay Love Stories 2009, and Best Gay Stories 2015. He is Prose Editor for Newtown Literary, a journal featuring work by writers from Queens, New York, and Editor of Best Gay Stories 2017 published by Lethe Press. Joe is represented by the Baldi Literary Agency and is a proud resident of the New York City borough of Queens.

Amble Press will publish Joe’s story collection, Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck on August 10, 2021.

CASEY HAMILTON is a writer with his roots in raw, fictional storytelling. A native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a graduate of Southern University and A&M College, he now writes from Atlanta, Georgia. After briefly working as a freelance copywriter, Hamilton followed his passion for creative writing with his 2013 amateur debut as a YouTube content creator and star of the gay web series Judys.

Amble Press will publish Casey’s debut novel, MENAFTER10 in the fall of 2021.

CALISTA LYNNE grew up on the American East Coast and is currently studying in London. She is having difficulty adjusting to the lack of Oxford commas across the pond and writes because it always seemed to make more sense than mathematics.

Amble Press will publish Calista’s novel, Hell Bent in 2022.

MONIQUE JENKINSON is an artist, performer, choreographer, and writer. Lauded for a “campy, intellectual juxtaposition of pop culture and high art,” her work considers the performance of femininity as a powerful, vulnerable, and subversive act. She made “herstory” as the first cis-woman to win a major drag queen pageant and subsequently her solo performance works have toured nationally and internationally in wide-ranging contexts from nightclubs to theaters to museums—from Joe’s Pub, New Museum, and the historic Stonewall in New York City, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ODC Theater, The Stud, CounterPulse and de Young Museum in San Francisco, and in Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Provincetown, London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Zürich, Paris, Reykjavik, Rome, Catania and Cork.

She has created space for kids to dress drag queens at a major museum and created college curricula. She played the DIRT (originated by Justin Vivian Bond) in Taylor Mac’s Lily’s Revenge and Eurydike in Anne Carson’s ANTIGONICK. She engaged in a public conversation with Gender Studies luminary Judith Butler and RuPaul bestie Michelle Visage within days of each other.

Honors include residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Tanzhaus Zürich and Atlantic Center for the Arts, an Irvine Fellowship, and residency at the de Young Museum, San Francisco Bay Guardian GOLDIE and Bay Area Reporter BESTIE awards and 7X7 Magazine’s “Hot 20.” She has been nominated for the Theater Bay Area, Isadora Duncan Dance (IZZIE), and Herb Alpert Foundation awards and has received support from San Francisco Arts Commission, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, CHIME, Center for Cultural Innovation, and the Kenneth Rainin and Zellerbach Family foundations.

Her memoir, Faux Queen will be published by Amble Press in early 2022.

ORLANDO ORTEGA-MEDINA is a native of Los Angeles. He studied English Literature at UCLA and has a Juris Doctor law degree from Southwestern University School of Law. At university, he won the National

Society of Arts and Letters Award for Short Stories.

Ortega-Medina’s short story collection Jerusalem Ablaze was shortlisted for The Polari First Book Prize. In 2018, he was named the Marilyn Hassid Emerging Author for the Houston Jewish Book & Arts Festival. He is the author of two novels, The Death of Baseball and The Savior of 6th Street. Ortega-Medina lives in London.

Amble Press will publish The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants in 2022.

RICHARD STEVENSON is the pseudonym of Richard Lipez, author of 18 books, including the Don Strachey private eye series. A former editorial writer at The Berkshire Eagle, Lipez reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post. His reporting, reviews, and fiction have appeared in Newsday, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and The Progressive, among others. Four of the Strachey books were filmed by HereTV. Nominated for four Lambda Awards for Best Gay Mystery, his book Red White Black and Blue won the award in 2011. Lipez grew up and was educated in Pennsylvania and taught in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. He is married to sculptor and video artist Joe Wheaton and lives in Becket, Massachusetts.

Amble Press will publish Richard’s novel, Knock Off the Hat: a Clifford Waterman Gay Philly Mystery, in 2022.