Writing
Writing is my home base. With both an MFA and a PhD in Creative Writing, I write richly researched stories, fresh and engaging research, and dynamic, revealing essays. I love creating memorable conversations on the page or in the writing classroom.
Awaken Your Sexuality: A Guide to Connection and Intimacy After Addiction and Trauma
“We need this book yesterday. . . a treasured resource” —from the foreword by Elizabeth Gilbert.
Co-authored with Dr. Stephanie Covington, this compassionate, comprehensive guide offers hope for those seeking to reconnect—or connect for the first time—with their sexual selves. Addiction, trauma, and shame can shatter your experience of intimacy and sexual joy. But healing is possible—and you are not alone.
Used alone or as a companion, the Awaken Your Sexuality Workbook offers practical tools and exercises to help you unlock the path to pleasure, intimacy, and connection with activities to help you process your sexual history, reflect on past experiences, and begin healing from old wounds.
Praise for Awaken Your Sexuality
“Awaken Your Sexuality puts women and nonbinary people at the center of a topic that too often leaves us out: how to thrive as a sexually authentic and vibrant human being, no matter the specifics . . . I wish I’d had this book during my eating disorder recovery —when I needed, more than most anything, to reconnect with my body, desires, and authentic sexual self.”
—August McLaughlin, Author, Journalist, and Host/Producer of Girl Boner Radio
“Drs. Covington and Carlisle guide their reader through reconnection to self while deconstructing systemic myths and increasing survivors’ hope and pleasure. This book is a needed tool for anyone exploring connections between sexuality, healing, and recovery.”
—Theodore Burnes, PhD, Professor of Clinical Education and Licensed Clinical Psychologist University of Southern California
Take Me With You
Kindred Powell’s youth is marked by a secret about who she is that her white mother and Black father kept from her. After her father Carl’s unjust incarceration and her mother’s death, Kindred moves from Los Angeles to New York in a desperate search for peace. There she finds her girlfriend Nautica, a career in sex work, and a kinky boy toy named Griffin. But when Kindred’s father goes missing from LA’s Skid Row, she must drop everything to find him, and her search reveals much more than she expected. From the strip club to the street protest, accompanied by friends and outcasts, Kindred struggles for answers about her past, justice for her father, and ultimately for the love and community that make living worthwhile.
Praise for Take Me With You
“Carlisle’s novel brings us confidently into Kindred’s life, beautifully illuminating her relationships with family, sex work, issues of class, and love. A debut of deep compassion and clear-eyed vision.”
—Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
“Take Me With You is a rallying cry, a command for those of us who call ourselves American to remember who we are and who we are supposed to be… This is a book to read and share. Deft and powerful from beginning to end.”
—Dana Johnson, author of In the Not Quite Dark and Elsewhere, California
A Crack in Everything
Twenty-five-year-old Tamina is a sharp-witted Jersey girl living in Hollywood with a near-phobic response to mismatching colors, an addiction to pedicures, and a hectic job teaching comprehensive sex education to urban youth. Suffering the consequences of a violent assault, Tam looks for relief in romance and LA's underground erotic entertainment scene. However, when Tam's young attacker unexpectedly resurfaces among a crowd of drag queens, porn stars, and musicians, Tam finally must make real choices. Fear or confrontation. Cynicism or curiosity. Silence or honesty. It would be surreal, if it wasn't LA.
Praise for A Crack in Everything
"Get ready: while other books may show up carefully dressed, this one answers the door in her underwear."
—SARK, Author, Artist, Creative Fountain, PlanetSARK.com
"The characters that inhabit this sharp and witty novel are troubled, impoverished, confused, lost, sexually frustrated, and intellectually unfulfilled. So...basically everyone I know."
—Mike Barker, Co-Creator and Head Writer, American Dad!
Hear an interview with Vanessa about Take Me With You on New Books Network
Listen to Vanessa talk about Take Me With you on Downtown Writer’s Jam
Read about catalyzing real world change in an interview with Vanessa on Women in Higher Education
Anthologies & Articles
We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival
This collection of narrative essays by sex workers presents a crystal-clear rejoinder: there’s never been a better time to fight for justice. Responding to the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, sex workers from across the industry—hookers and prostitutes, strippers and dancers, porn stars, cam models, Dommes and subs alike—complicate narratives of sexual harassment and violence, and expand conversations often limited to normative workplaces.
Vol 120, Issue 3 Edited by Heather Berg
In this Special Topics edition of SAQ, sex workers theorize everything from customer service to global precarity, antiwork politics and identity, emotional labor, migrant experience, and capitalizm.
South Atlantic Quarterly: Reading Sex Work
Whorephobia: Strippers on Art, Work, and Life
No one knows more than strippers about being looked at: as objects of desire, objects of curiosity, as angels or Jezebels or hookers with hearts of gold. In this anthology, twenty-three dancers whose careers span decades, geographies, and identities demand to be seen. Through stories from first nights on the job to the day they hung up their sky-high heels—or decided they never will—these writers offer glimpses into lives of camaraderie and celebration, joy, pride, despair, frustration, self-doubt, and fear.
Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience
From D. H. Lawrence to Philip Roth, acclaimed male writers have depicted sex from the perspective of female characters. Now, women writers from Aimee Bender to Jennifer Egan engage in provocative fictional cross-dressing, exploring sexuality from the male point of view. With a foreword by Steve Almond, this provocative collection includes work from twenty-six women in all, including Bender, Egan, Susan Minot, Elizabeth Benedict, Alicia Erian, and Diane Williams.