Join authors Julie Kliegman (Mind Game) and Michael Waters (The Other Olympians) for a candid conversation about their books, sports, queerness, and the long arc of gender panic and its impacts on athletes. Afterward, we'll have an audience Q&A and a book signing.

More about Julie Kliegman and Mind Game:

Julie Kliegman is a writer and editor in Astoria. They wrote Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes and are at work on a biography titled Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis's Trans Pioneer. Julie’s writing has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Bookforum, Slate, The Ringer, Defector, Texas Monthly, Vulture, BuzzFeed News, and The Verge.

In growing numbers, athletes are speaking up about their struggles with mental illness--including high-profile stars such as Michael Phelps, Kevin Love, Simone Biles, and Naomi Osaka. More disclosures are surely on the way, as athletes recognize that their openness can help others and inspire those around them.

In Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes, Julie Kliegman offers insight into how elite athletes navigate mental performance and mental illness--and what non-athletes can learn from them. They explore the recent mental health movement in sports, the history and practice of sport psychology, the stereotypes and stigmas that lead athletes to keep their troubles to themselves, and the ways in which injury and retirement can throw wrenches in their mental states. Kliegman also examines the impacts of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, substance use, and more, with a keen eye toward moving forward with acceptance, progress, and problem-solving.

Featuring insightful interviews with Olympians Chloe Kim, McKayla Maroney, and Adam Rippon, NBA players Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan, former U.S. Open tennis champ Bianca Andreescu, and many other athletes and experts, Mind Game breaks down the ongoing, heartening movement of athletes across sports coming forward to get the care they need and deserve--and to help others feel safe opening up about their struggles, as well.

More about Michael Waters and The Other Olympians:

Michael Waters is the author of The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, which was a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His next book, tentatively titled Give Me Some Credit, will be published in fall 2027.

The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today’s culture wars. In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.

Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.

In Conversation: Julie Kliegman and Michael Waters

Join us for a conversation and author signing