Sitting at Books & Books in Coral Gables on a sunny afternoon, life seems almost back to normal talking to Floridian author Kristen Arnett. With her new book,
With Teeth, releasing on June 1, and her pre-orders at the local bookstore offering personalized signed copies, the spot feels the perfect place for a conversation about how her work explores the variety of people that exist in this weird and wonderful state. When I first started writing [
With Teeth], I was still living in Orlando and thinking a lot about queer spaces, which morphed itself into thinking about the lack of queer spaces, Arnett explains. There s a ton of queer people in Central Florida and barely any gay nightclubs or bars or places to go. This moved me to think about the lack of queer parenting groups or anything like that.