Arts and Letters

When Lucy Sante’s “egg cracked,” she found in artist and musician Leor Miller a contagiously confident guide as she stepped into the world as a trans woman. According to Sante, Miller “was amazingly comfortable in her own skin, ready to meet the world head-on with no pretenses or apologies. Despite such obvious differences, we were alike in a great many ways… I would often completely forget about the forty-three-year age difference between us, because Leor needed nothing explained to her. She was exactly like someone I would have been friends with forty years earlier. She was, when you came down to it, my trans mother—all transsexuals need one.”

On the occasion of her exhibition Knots, Sante invites Leor Miller’s Fear of Her Own Desire to perform a concert in the Library. Sante will also read from her new book, My Heart & I Agree, released just days before the event.

This event is free and open to the public with RSVP. Reservations can be made here. Space is limited.

Leor Miller (b. 1997; Evanston, IL) is a photographer, writer, and musician based in Brooklyn. She studied photography at Bard College and the Yale School of Art, where she received the Richard Benson Prize. In April 2026, her work will be the subject of a solo exhibition, Dividing Water from Water, at Ptolemy, Queens. Her work has been published in MATTE Magazine, The New York Times, Musée Magazine, and others. Her recording and performance project, Leor Miller's Fear of Her Own Desire, spans genres and approaches across an extensive back catalog; her record eternal bliss now! was featured in Rosy Overdrive's Top Albums of 2023. She is a transgender woman.

Lucy Sante (b. 1954; Verviers, Belgium) emigrated with her family to the United States in the early 1960s, settling in New Jersey. She has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1981. Her books—including Low Life (1991), Kill All Your Darlings (2007), Folk Photography (2009), The Other Paris (2015), Maybe the People Would Be the Times (2020), I Heard Her Call My Name (2024, a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize), and My Heart & I Agree (2026)—range across memoir, cultural history, and criticism, often attending to what has been marginal or erased. Her honors include a Whiting Award, an Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Grammy for album notes, an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. From 1999 to 2023, she taught writing and the history of photography at Bard College. She lives in the Hudson River Valley. Sante’s collages are also on view at Picture Theory, New York, through mid-April. Knots is Sante’s first institutional exhibition.