Artist description Kirk Read is the author of "How I Learned to Snap", a memoir about being openly gay in a small southern high school during the late 1980s. He grew up in Lexington, Virginia, the birthplace of Pat Robertson and home to Virginia Military Institute, which schooled three generations of his family. He began writing at age 13 and had his first play staged at 16. Three of his plays were professionally produced while he was in high school, and he was an apprentice and later a playwright-in-residence at the Shenandoah International Playwrights Retreat. He graduated from the University of Virginia as an Echols Scholar and wrote his senior thesis on themes of rescue and salvation in Horatio Alger novels, contemporary gay porn, and the children's television show Pee Wee's Playhouse. He delivered the paper to his professor in a brown paper bag and, upon graduation, moved to D.C. and then New York. In New York, he studied at Playwrights Horizons, was a literary intern at the off-Broadway house American Place Theater, and was a cocktail waiter and bartender at several bars he is delighted to report have gone out of business. He moved back to Virginia and wound up as editor of the state's monthly gay and lesbian newspaper, Our Own Community Press, where he spent two years. He spent three summers teaching playwriting to high school students at Theatre Virginia and worked as a computer tech in inner city kindergarten classrooms. He began syndicating a humorous op-ed column, which appeared in over 70 print and web outlets, including The Washington Blade, Southern Voice, Frontiers, and Philadelphia Gay News. The column has won four Vice Versa gay press awards. In 1998, he moved to San Francisco to pursue writing, activism, and adventure. He spent a year washing dishes at a Castro homeless feeding and worked as an intake counselor at the St. James Infirmary, a free heath care clinic for sex workers. He was part of the collective that produced the 1999 and 2000 Gay Men's Health Summits in Boulder, Colorado, a conference which has given birth to over a dozen regional health conferences around the country. As a freelance writer, his work has appeared in Out, Genre, Christopher Street, QSF, and a host of alt-weeklies, websites and LGBT newspapers. He currently lives in San Francisco, where he is working on a second book.

Location San Francisco, CA - USA

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