Chana Porter

Chana Porter, who works from Los Angeles, writes for the theatre as well as the page, and co-founded the Octavia Project, a free Brooklyn summer programme that teaches writing and science to teenage girls and non-binary young people through speculative fiction. She took an MFA at Goddard College, studying with the novelist Rachel Pollack, and has taught at Houston, Fordham and Hampshire College, with plays developed at the Flea Theater, Playwrights Horizons and La MaMa. The Seep, her first novel, appeared from Soho Press in 2020: a gentle alien presence arrives, everything becomes easy and possible, and Trina Goldberg-Oneka has to live with what her wife decides to do with that freedom. It was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Transgender Fiction. The Thick and the Lean followed from Saga Press in 2023, set in a community where appetite for food is the forbidden thing and cooking is the real transgression; it was also a Lambda finalist, and The Times of London named it among the best science fiction of that year.