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Trailblazers in Conversation with Annie Liontas

Join LA County Librarian Skye Patrick for a conversation about disability, identity, and creativity with Annie Liontas, author of Sex With a Brain Injury.

After suffering a concussion at age 35 due to a biking accident, Annie experienced two more traumatic brain injuries over the course of a year. These left them with migraines, disorientation, anxiety, and marked a profound turning point in their relationships with their wife, community, and self. Annie will be discussing how these injuries changed their life and work, and opened up new and unexpected pathways towards intimacy, community, and understanding.

Annie Liontas is the trans-genderqueer author of the crip-queer memoir Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery, which won the ALA’s 2025 Stonewall Award for Nonfiction and was shortlisted for The Athenaeum of Philadelphia's Literary Award. Their debut novel, Let Me Explain You, was selected as New York Times Editors Choice in 2015. They co-edited the anthology A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors, and their work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.

A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, Annie is an Associate Professor of writing at George Washington University and serves as faculty at the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Annie has volunteered as a mentor for Pen City’s incarcerated writers and helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system in Washington, DC. They co-host the literary podcast LitFriends and live in Philadelphia with their wife, dog, and Email the rabbit.

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