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Erica Vanstone: Don't Let Them Eat the Baby
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
The roller derby book we’ve been waiting for. Founding Editor of Banana Pitch Press, Michelle Kicherer, will be interviewing Banana Pitch author and former Executive Director of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, Erica Vanstone, about her debut roller derby book, Don’t Let Them Eat the Baby. Erica will be joined by Rose City Roller’s Executive Director, Kim Stegeman, whose book The Menopause Unicorn came out in June 2025.
Talk about small press publishing, the joys and terrors of writing a debut book, the importance of community in roller derby and other women’s sports — and more. Audience Q&A to follow.
More on Don’t Let Them Eat the Baby:
The year is 2006, and roller derby is on the brink of a massive explosion. This was right after the TV show Rollergirls, before the movie Whip It, and before Erica Vanstone ever dreamed of becoming the Executive Director of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA). Soon, the newly married NYU film school grad will nearly flip her life upside down to get the sport of roller derby on broadcast TV. And it all starts the night Erica walks into a Camden roller rink.
Erica doesn’t realize her soul needs saving until she reads the words on the back of someone’s T-shirt: Roller derby saved my soul. With AC/DC blasting overhead, Erica watches two teams of fishnet-clad and tattooed women muscling their way around a rink in a counterclockwise direction. As the unapologetically badass skaters fly by, both intimidating and inspiring, Erica doesn’t yet understand the sport, but something in her bones tells her she wants in on it.
Before she even knows the rules, Erica finds herself announcing at roller derby bouts all over the city and soon, the country. While navigating career shifts, motherhood and eye-roll-inducing misogyny, Erica finds a way to help grow the sport into what it is today, while never giving up on its roots or herself.
In this memoirella, Erica Vanstone weaves a humorous, humbling personal narrative with cultural journalism to make the case for women’s sports as a community lifeline. Don’t Let Them Eat the Baby is told in raw, unrelenting prose by one of roller derby’s architects. Now more than ever, the world needs safer sport spaces like roller derby: a sport steeped in authenticity and belonging. In her debut memoirella, Vanstone shares why roller derby is the greatest sport never sold and learns what parts of her own soul really needed saving.