Soft Core with Brittany Newell and Maria Silk
Sunday, July 13, 2025 | 3-4pm
Slash (1150 25th St, Building B, San Francisco, CA)
Free event, no RSVP required
Slash and the San Francisco Art Book Fair present a conversation between San Francisco writer and performer Brittany Newell and artist Maria Silk. Newell and Silk, who are longtime collaborators, will discuss Newell’s most recent novel Soft Core (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025). Soft Core is a love story centered on Ruth, a stripper who lives in San Francisco with her ex-boyfriend Dino until she comes home from the club one day and finds that he has disappeared. The book tracks Ruth’s everyday life and emotional landscape as she looks for Dino and becomes increasingly unmoored from reality.
Following a reading from the novel, Newell and Silk will draw on their own shared experience as performers in the City’s drag scene to connect the book to larger topics related to performance, nightlife, and San Francisco. The conversation will be followed by a book signing.
Maria Silk is a San Francisco-based artist, choreographer, and writer. Her practice emerges from years of immersion in Bay Area queer nightlife as a drag queen and producer. Silk is currently a PhD student in the Performance Studies program at UC Berkeley.
Brittany Newell is a writer and performer living in San Francisco. Her debut novel Oola was published in 2017 at the age of 21 in the US, UK, and Germany. You can find her written work in Granta, N+1, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and Playgirl. Her second novel Soft Core was published in February 2025 by FSG in the US, UK, and France. She and her wife Maria Silk run a monthly drag and dance party called Angels with Myles Cooper at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, one of San Francisco’s oldest queer bars.
*For inquiries about accessibility or to request an accommodation, please email ana@slashart.org.