Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is a poet, performance-artist, actor, director, songwriter, and activist who has promoted audience participation in hundreds of performances everywhere from street corner mailboxes, to Bronx butcher shops, to the Guggenheim Museum. Currently sheltering-in-place alone, Annie has embarked on a solo decameron, with a nod to Boccaccio, to tell one hundred original stories on her podcast “Annie’s Story Cave.” Her books include: Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning, and Stage Light; Pitch Roll Yaw; L is for Lion: an italian bronx butch freedom memoir (finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award), and Schistsong. Lanzillotto was on the founding board of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition.  Her audiobooks can be found on Audible.com; her albums at Bandcamp.com, and videos on YouTube.

Emily was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her book, Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, won the 2019 LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily lives in South Burlington, Vermont.