Trans Realities & Dystopian Futures with Alex DiFrancesco

What if the way we think about art, awards, and even genre is completely backwards? Alex DiFrancesco reveals how queer storytelling moves between short stories, dystopian fiction, and memoir not as a branding strategy, but because each idea asks to become its own form. Alex, the author of All City, Transmutation, Breaking the Curse, and the new The Grief Shop and Other Stories from a Broken World, shares the real-life moments that shaped their work, from Superstorm Sandy and the uneven recovery of New York to Banksy’s citywide installations and the deeper question of who gets left behind when disaster hits. DiFrancesco also gives us aglimpse of what’s next: a Pennsylvania gothic sci-fi novel with a haunted young woman and an AI replica of her dead grandmother, and a wild Odyssey retelling following a pregnant trans man on a stolen jet ski across Lake Erie.