Joy Ladin to speak at URI and Brown

Transgender author and professor will share her experiences

Joy LadinIn an interactive program sponsored by the University of Rhode LGBTQ Center and URI Hillel as part of Trans*Awareness Week 2014, transgender author and professor, Joy Ladin, will speak on Nov. 20 from 4-6 p.m. at the Norman M. Fain Hillel Center, 6 Fraternity Circle, Kingston.

Her presentation will be followed by a light dinner and a question-and-answer session. The program will conclude with a short vigil in honor of Trans*Day of Remembrance.

At 8 p.m., Ladin will speak at Brown-RISD Hillel, 80 Brown St., Providence. A question-and-answer session and dessert reception will follow.

Professor Joy Ladin’s return to Yeshiva University as a woman after receiving tenure as a man made her the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. Her memoir of gender transition, “Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders,” was a finalist for a 2012 National Jewish Book Award, and winner of a Forward Fives award, and she was named to the 2012 Forward 50 list of influential or courageous American Jews. She is also the author of six books of poetry, including “Psalms” and Lambda Literary Award finalist “Transmigration”; her seventh collection, “Impersonation,” is due out in 2015. She holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Yeshiva University. Her work has been recognized with a Fulbright Scholarship and an American Council of Learned Societies research fellowship. She has spoken about gender identity issues around the country, and was featured on NPR’s “On Being” with Krista Tippett and other NPR programs. She serves on the Board of Keshet, a national organization devoted to full inclusion of LGTBQ Jews in the Jewish world

In “Through the Door of Life,” Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self. With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual and philosophical questions that arise. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain of her experience living as the “wrong” gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. Ladin’s poignant memoir takes readers from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn’t, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships and love she finds when she opens the door of life.

The URI program is free and open to the public but RSVPs are requested and may be made by email to Amy Olson at Hillel, amyolson@mail.uri.edu or to Annie Kosar at the LGBTQ Center, anniem@mail.uri.edu. For more information about other Trans*Awareness Week programs at URI, visit www.uri.edu/glbt

The Brown-RISD program is also open to all. For more information on that program, contact Abby Kay-Phillips at abbykp@brown.edu or 401-863-6507.