Calvin Gimpelevich

Calvin Gimpelevich is an American writer. He is the founder of the T4T Reading Series in Boston, Massachusetts, and a founding member of the Lion’s Main Art Collective in Seattle, Washington.^[1][2][3] He was born in San Francisco, and has lived around the West Coast and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.^[4][5]

Gimpelevich received a Bachelor of Arts from University of California, Santa Cruz in 2012.^[6]

Gimpelevich is the author of the short story collection Invasions (Instar Books, 2018), a Lambda Literary Awards finalist.^[7]

His writing has also appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, A Public Space, Joyland, The Stinging Fly, Cream City Review, Them, The Account, and elsewhere. ^{[8] [9]}

He has been anthologized in The Best American Essays 2022 (HarperCollins, 2022), Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers (LittlePuss Press, 2021), and The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (Topside Press, 2012).^[10][11][12]

Gimpelevich works in both fiction and nonfiction. Common themes in his writing include ways that class and technologies operate on queer bodies and relationships; transgression; morality; and the fluidity of perception and identity.^{[13][14][15][16]} His fiction operates at the intersection of speculative fiction and literary realism.^[17]

In 2023, Gimpelevich founded the T4T Reading Series, a monthly event in Boston that spotlights published transgender authors. Gimpelevich ran the series from 2023-25.^[18] Past featured readers include McKenzie Wark, Emily Zhou, Jeanne Thornton, Andrea Lawlor, Denne Michele Norris, Torrey Peters, Imogen Binnie, Casey Plett, Jordy Rosenberg, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and others.^[19]

He is also a founding member of the Lion’s Main Art Collective for Queer and Trans Artists, a Seattle-based group of artists working across a variety of media, which has exhibited together and organized events at cultural institutions since 2013.^[20][21]

Gimpelevich is a 2022 NEA Fellow and a recipient of the 2020 Markowitz Emerging Writers Award from Lambda Literary.^[22][23]

His work has been recognized by Artist Trust, Jack Straw Cultural Center, 4Culture, CODEX/Writer's Block, Studios at Mass MoCA, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Speculative Literature Foundation, and Woodward Residency.^[24][25]

His webcomic, Wolfmen, was awarded the 2014 Prism Comics Queer Press Grant.^[26]