Ashley Netanel (she/her) is the Associate Director for Health Promotion and Wellness Initiatives at Swarthmore College, where she leads initiatives to integrate holistic well-being into campus policies, programs, and culture. As a member of the Division of Student Affairs, she's passionate about facilitating young adult identity development and community flourishing. Outside of work, she's usually sipping coffee with a good book, overanalyzing sapphic media, or chasing her 17-month-old toddler in the hopes that she, too, might sit down and read for five minutes.

What are you reading these days? I'm currently rereading Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson. But anyone who's talked to me about my reading habits over the past year knows I've been on what I've dubbed my “Self-Directed Literary Residency in Asymmetrical Sapphic Longing”: seventeen gut-wrenching tales of one woman becoming hopelessly enthralled by and entangled with another, usually unavailable, woman, only to be left utterly wrecked by the end. Written on the Body is just one stop on this journey. Needless to say, I'm not really one for the traditional coffee shop “meet-cute” romance novel.

Describe your favorite place to read on campus: The amphitheater overlook.

Is there a book you've read multiple times? Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel. (Hot take: While I think Fun Home is the literally superior graphic memoir, I've always resonated much more with Are You My Mother?—which probably explains why I’ve returned to it so many times.)

Who is your favorite author? Jeanette Winterson. I've often said that she writes the way I think. If you want an off-the-cuff thesis, ask me about how Winterson is a literary descendant of Virginia Woolf and embodies the figure of Judith Shakespeare from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.I also have a thing for Djuna Barnes (so much so that I've named my cat after her).

What's the latest book you could not finish even though you thought you should?  After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz. This book is right up my alley; still I've tried to pick it up two separate times and never even made it halfway. I'll come back to it eventually.

What is your favorite reading genre? Without a doubt, sapphic fiction. I also happen to read a lot of memoirs and biographies...about, you guessed it, queer women.

What book do you recommend most often?  Most recently, My Education by Susan Choi. It's the best book I've read all year and the first one in a long time to have made me cry by the end. But you'll also often catch me recommending Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, Outlawed by Anna North, and Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.

What's the best movie adaptation of a book you've read? Carol. Full stop. Whatever the film loses in plot accuracy from The Price of Salt, it more than makes up for in stunning cinematography and a captivating score that capture the novel’s emotional tenor.

What book made an early impact on you and why? Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, edited by Lillian Faderman. I checked out this nearly 900-page anthology from my local library during my senior year of high school, when I was navigating my sexuality, and I hauled it around everywhere, hoping someone at school might notice and hold the closet door open for me. Ultimately, it made an impact on me because, at a time when I was gravely in need of representation, it taught me that I was part of a long-standing literary history. (And yes, I read the entire thing cover to cover that year!)

Is there a question you wish we had asked? Bookish fun fact: I collect lesbian pulp novels from the 1950-60s. I have over 30 of them at this point. OR, Latest Book Haul: I just got back from a trip to the Hudson Valley over fall break, where I stopped at four different bookshops. I came home with a used copy of Lillian Faderman’s memoir Naked in the Promised Land; another copy of Chloe Plus Olivia (my second!), rescued from a local LGBT Center book sale; a used copy of Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead; and Justine by Forsyth Harmon. Somehow, this assortment feels like a pretty accurate reflection of my life right now.