Jennifer Finney Boylan Offers Presidential Colloquium April 30

“I know there are plenty of people who, looking back at their younger selves, have had occasion to think, ‘Man, what you don’t know could fill a book.’ I’m unique, however, in that the book filled with things I don’t know is an actual book.”

So writes best-selling author and activist Jennifer Finney Boylan in the introduction to the 10th-anniversary edition of her memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders.

Boylan will be at Smith on Thursday, April 30, to present a Presidential Colloquium that shares a title with her memoir. The event will take place at 4:30 p.m. in John M. Greene Hall.

Organized by the Working Group on Campus Discourse, Boylan’s talk is free and open to the public; no tickets are required. Following Boylan’s talk, members of the Smith community are invited to participate in small-group discussions of “Gender Matters”—one of the working group’s topics—over dinner.

Writing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin called She’s Not There “the Running with Scissors of sex-change stories.” The book “brings irreverence and a merrily outrageous sense of humor to this potentially serious business,” Maslin noted.

Boylan is a widely praised author and professor, as well as a contributing opinion editor for The New York Times. She is an activist for LGBT people in general, and transmen and transwomen in particular, through her writing and through her involvement as a member of various boards, including GLAAD and the Kinsey Institute. She also advocates for storytellers, in part through her support of the PEN American Center and, above all, through her work with her students at Colby College in Maine, where she was part of the English department for 25 years, and at Barnard College, which she joined in 2014 as the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence.

More information about Boylan and her work is available on her website, jenniferboylan.net.