AG Literary Events
Saturday, September 27, 2025
10:30 am Eastern
Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Massachusetts
With efforts to roll back protections for LGBTQ people on the rise, join bestselling novelist Torrey Peters and trailblazing ACLU attorney Chase Strangio for a conversation about the power of storytelling, in both literature and legal advocacy, to envision and enact a society that is more just and inclusive. “If you put our lives at the center of your political policy, your package of political repression, then it also offers us a huge opportunity to be like, ‘Okay, let us tell you what we really are,’” Peters has said. “They can try and shut us up, but if we’re making the better art, and we’ve got the more compelling stories, then it’s a huge opportunity for us.”
Strangio, who became the first openly transgender person to argue before the Supreme Court in 2024’s US v. Skrmetti, has suggested that the law itself cannot “be the savior or transformative tool for building the world that we want. I think that the role of lawyers like myself is to hold back the government, to hold back the harms of the government. To create cracks in the system and breathing room for the real movements to have more space—movements and people that are transformative and visionary in ways that I will never be.”Co-presented by Berkshire Stonewall Community Coalition
This event is co-presented by Berkshire Stonewall Community Coalition. WIT Literary Festival livestreams are produced by CTSB with promotional support from The Nation.
Torrey Peters is the author of the bestselling novel Detransition, Baby, for which she won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. It was also named a Best Book of the Century by The New York Times and was a finalist for the 2021 John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle. Her new collection of stories is Stag Dance (2025). She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Master’s in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont.
Chase Strangio is Co-Director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. A national leader in transgender rights litigation and advocacy, he has been counsel in some of the past decade’s most pivotal legal fights on behalf of transgender litigants. In 2024, he was counsel of record for the private plaintiffs in United States v. Skrmetti and argued on their behalf before the Supreme Court. He was also counsel in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that struck down bans on marriages for same-sex couples. In addition to his advocacy in the courtroom and in state legislatures, he appears regularly in media and has produced multiple short films including Texas Strong, an Emmy-award winning short. He is also a co-founder of the Lorena Borjas Community Fund, TranSanta, and the Trans Week of Visibility and Action. His forthcoming memoir is Sparkle in the Darkness: A Transgender Rights Activist’s Journey.
Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females, now in its second edition, was a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her latest book, Authority, was released in April.
Join us this September in the beautiful Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts for the WIT Literary Festival—a celebration of writers, their work, and the vital role they play in society. By bringing writers and readers together for an unforgettable weekend of timely conversations, the WIT Literary Festival reflects the belief that a rich culture of free expression is essential to a thriving democracy.
Who are we? What do we believe? In what kind of country do we want to live?
Guided by this year’s theme, The Power of Words: Authors & Activism, the WIT Literary Festival welcomes audiences to explore these abiding questions with a distinguished group of speakers renowned for their artistic virtuosity, intellectual passion, moral seriousness, restless faith, and civic engagement.
Learn more about WIT 2025 here.
