Resources
From Category: Books
Stone Butch Blues
By Leslie Feinberg. This 1993 autobiographical novel is a radical queer classic. Jess, a factory worker in Buffalo in the 1960s and 70s, endures family rejection and police violence as a butch lesbian. Black-market medical treatment allows Jess to live as a man for awhile, affording them some safety but alienating them from their lesbian community and history. The choice to revert to a gender-nonconforming appearance feels authentic yet dangerous. Meanwhile, they're attempting to build solidarity in the workers' movement without exposing themselves to anti-queer attacks, a path that culminates in activism in 1980s New York City alongside their trans femme lover. In keeping with Feinberg's Communist philosophy, the book is free to download from their website, or available from Lulu.com in hard copy for the cost of printing and shipping.
The Best of Michael Swanwick
By Michael Swanwick. This first volume in a career retrospective of the award-winning speculative fiction author spans over 25 years of creative tales about planetary consciousness, time travel, steampunk con artists, dinosaur tourist attractions, and what would be gained and lost if we could re-engineer the human brain.
State of Grass
By Janet MacFadyen. This poetry collection brings the topic of family trauma out of the merely confessional and into the mythic. On retreat in Ireland after her father's death, an older woman recovers her incest memories, the lineaments of her story emerging like a preserved bog body or the archaeological traces of a famine-destroyed village. The land's stark beauty and endurance create a space for her to hold her personal recovery in historical perspective, creating a fellowship with her wounded ancestors.
Enter Ghost
By Isabella Hammad. A troupe of Palestinian actors navigate obstacles to stage an Arabic-language adaptation of Hamlet in the West Bank, angering the Israeli government with their implied critique of an illegitimate ruler. This subtle and thought-provoking literary novel is narrated by Sonia, an expat with British citizenship who returns to her family home to find direction in life when her acting career stalls. Her journey from spectator to activist mirrors Hamlet's emergence from passivity. The story explores what it means to engage in political resistance as an artist in our current moment: Hammad neither overstates the power of protest theater, nor succumbs to crude materialist dismissal of art as a luxury or distraction.
How To Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses
By Dennis James Sweeney. This concise, friendly guide to building a literary career in the small press world is a one-stop shop for all your questions, from the "how" to the "why" to "what next?" Learn about selecting the right journal for your work, the mechanics of the process from both sides of the editor's desk, keeping track of submissions, what happens when your book is published, keeping up faith in your writing, and identifying your deepest personal goals for your work in the world. The focus is on community-building, first and foremost. Think of your publications as part of a conversation rather than a judgment on your worth. Sweeney is an experimental essayist, poet, and teacher at Amherst College and GrubStreet in Boston.
Ojo
By Donald Mengay. In this Joycean novel about queer life in the American West, a young man flees his repressive Cleveland suburb and the ghost of his first lover, to find himself as an artist in a trailer on the edge of the Colorado desert. In the small town of Ojo Caliente, Jake's unlikely family-of-choice comes to include a swinging pastor and his lesbian wife's feminist book club, a construction worker torn between his passion for Jake and his comically fertile wife, and an assertive Latino lover who lives in a household of sharp-tongued trans femmes. This fragile utopia is further riven by the advent of AIDS, yet sensuality and farcical humor leaven the grief. Reading this multivocal, stream-of-consciousness story is like overhearing tantalizing snippets of strangers' conversations on a long train ride. One gradually learns to recognize their voices without context or transitions, and the close attention required to follow the narrative makes its scenes that much more memorable. Ojo is the second book in a planned trilogy that began with The Lede to Our Undoing.
Don’t Know Tough
By Eli Cranor. This heart-wrenching novel limns American toxic masculinity and small-town desperation. Billy Lowe is a small-town Arkansas football star who's only ever known abuse and poverty. His response to everything is violence, but deep down he wants to be a better person. His Coach thinks of himself as a heroic Christian mentor, but when it comes down to it, his savior complex and selfishness get in the way. Coach's daughter is the one who actually understands the meaning of sacrificial compassion. She not only sees Billy's innocent soul but is willing to share his stigmatized and dangerous existence in order to reach him. Their unlikely friendship revolves around literature. If anything can give Billy the self-awareness to break intergenerational patterns, it might be a book.
Making Room: Three Decades of Fighting for Beds, Belonging, and a Safe Place for LGBTQ Youth
By Carl Siciliano. This luminous memoir by the founder of the Ali Forney Center, the nation's first homeless shelter for queer and trans teens, is both a spiritual autobiography and an incisive social history of the 1980s-90s. Siciliano shows how we could save children's lives with a small fraction of our city and state budgets, yet often ignore this population because of racism, queerphobia, and even respectability politics in the gay community. Moreover, the problem would not exist on such a huge scale without hateful theology from Christian institutions that causes families to throw their queer kids out on the streets. Siciliano poignantly describes a lifelong struggle with his Catholic faith. The church is responsible for a great deal of abuse, but the tradition also gave him role models for a life of sacred service, like St. Francis and Dorothy Day. As a spiritual touchstone, the author returns to memories of Ali Forney, a murdered genderqueer teen, drug user and survival sex worker, who proclaimed unshakeable confidence in God's love.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
By Deesha Philyaw. These bittersweet stories immerse the reader in the lives of Black women struggling against patriarchy and hypocrisy. Mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and secret queer lovers weigh the risks of authentic intimacy versus passing on patterns of repression to the next generation in order to keep them safe. Philyaw's debut book was a National Book Award finalist and a PEN/Faulkner Prize winner.
Not Akhmatova
By Noah Berlatsky. Playful and musical, yet weighty with paradox, this collection pairs freewheeling translations of Russian-Jewish poet Anna Akhmatova and original poems that respond to the fraught question of Jewish loyalties in the diaspora. Berlatsky shows that one doesn't have to believe in God to argue with Him. In these pages, Akhmatova is both present and absent, a figure who epitomizes her people's persecuted dead. The shape of that absence has sometimes seemed to bend Jewish identity around it like a black hole. Berlatsky recognizes that gravitational pull even as he resists it. This serious project is leavened by wry aphorisms about the ephemeral nature of poetry, and indeed life itself—a pessimistic, wisecracking sense of humor that situates Berlatsky firmly within the Judaism with which he wrestles.
A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest
By Charlie J. Stephens. This exquisite coming-of-age story depicts a queer youth struggling to survive in the rural Oregon of the 1980s. In the human world, the narrator's life is defined by poverty, instability, and abuse from their mother's boyfriends. But to Smokey, a nonbinary child with a shamanic connection to animals, the human world is not the only or most important one. The adults are tossed around by delusion and impulse, even Smokey's mother, who is genuinely devoted but succumbs to her addiction to dangerous men. The child's view of reality is clear, compassionate, and attuned to beauty. This makes the book hopeful in a strange way, despite the tragedies that pile up.
The Prophets
By Robert Jones Jr. Set on a Mississippi plantation, this devastating yet life-affirming novel centers on the forbidden love of two young Black enslaved men. Multiple perspectives reveal how sexual violation and erotic entanglement give the lie to the brutally maintained separation of Black and white, as well as the complex uses of Christianity to comfort the oppressed while muting their rebellion. Interspersed with the deadly despair of the plantation scenes are hopeful visions of pre-colonizer African cultures that respected queer identities, a legacy that finds expression in the main characters' pure bond.
The Wrestler’s Cruel Study
By Stephen Dobyns. Poet and noir mystery novelist Dobyns branches out into philosophical farce in this ensemble-cast comedy set in early 1990s New York City, where wrestling matches re-enact early Christian disputes about the nature of evil, and anyone's life might unwittingly mimic a Grimm's fairy tale. What holds this capacious story together is the idea that truth is only manifested through artifical personae and constructed narratives—what wrestlers call their Gimmicks—and if there is free will, it consists of noticing your Gimmick and maybe choosing a different one.
Rhyheim
By Vikram Kolmannskog. Subtitled "A porn poem," this lyrical and erotic chapbook is a meditation on scenes from Black gay adult performer Rhyheim Shabazz's videos. Slow-motion, stream-of-consciousness descriptions of sexual encounters transform into moments of spiritual oneness with concepts from Hindu mysticism. As a queer man of color in predominantly white Norway, Kolmannskog finds inspiration and self-acceptance in Rhyheim's multi-racial intimate couplings. Publisher Broken Sleep Books is a small press in Wales with a working-class orientation and an interest in social justice.
Momma, Did You Hear the News?
By Sanya Whittaker Gragg, with illustrations by Kim Holt. This sensitive picture book features a Black family giving their two young sons "the Talk" about how to avoid being shot by the police. The book manages children's fears about current events in an age-appropriate way, and also conveys a nuanced message that many police officers are good people doing a dangerous job.
White Man’s Grave
By Richard Dooling. This anti-colonialist satire from the early 1990s holds up extraordinarily well. One could describe it as a talkback to Heart of Darkness combined with Tom Wolfe's style of exaggerated depictions of American folly and greed. When a Peace Corps volunteer goes missing in the jungle of an unnamed West African country, his naive Midwestern best friend embarks on a quest to rescue him, blundering dangerously and ridiculously into a web of intrigue involving witchcraft, foreign-backed coups, and misdirected international aid. Meanwhile, the missing man's father, a ruthless bankruptcy lawyer, starts to fear that he's been hexed...and that maybe he deserves it.
The Reformatory
By Tananarive Due. This gripping ghost story was inspired by a real-life ancestor of the author's, who died in a reformatory in the Jim Crow South. "Haints" are the least of Robbie Stephens' problems when he's sent to a sadistic juvenile prison for a trumped-up offense against a white boy in the rural Florida of 1950. The town's white power brokers want to use him as a pawn to bring his father out of hiding; Klansmen and police alike are gunning for Robert Senior because of his work organizing millworkers and registering Black voters. Meanwhile, Robbie's teenage sister and her 80-year-old godmother are discovering that even NAACP lawyers aren't a match for the racist judicial system. Freeing Robbie will require supernatural intervention.
The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal
By Jonathan Mooney. In this affecting and funny road-trip memoir, the author decided to fight his internalized ableism as a former special-education student by traveling through America in an old schoolbus to meet other neurodivergent and learning-disabled people. His personal experiences are interwoven with historical background on the social construction of conditions such as autism, Down syndrome, and dyslexia, with suggestions for how we might frame cognitive differences in a less judgmental way.
Send $19.99 for Supplements and Freedom: The Chapbook
By Noah Berlatsky. This satirical chapbook of found-poetry and hybrid texts includes a pantoum based on Joe Rogan's right-wing talk radio rants, absurd diagrams and multiple-choice questions mashing up the Graduate Record Exam with The Artist's Way, and a Swinburne double sestina featuring Jordan Peterson's pronouncements about masculinity and lobsters. It's like scrolling social media while dropping acid.
Feed the Beast
By Pádraig Ó Tuama. Rage, survival, and the tentative beginning of self-love infuse this poetry chapbook about theological and sexual abuse in the Irish Catholic Church. The author was forced into "conversion therapy" for his homosexuality by a priest who molested him. Broken Sleep Books, the publisher of this collection, is a Welsh literary press with an interest in social justice and working-class themes.
Hail and Farewell
By Abby E. Murray. This incisive debut poetry collection from Perugia Press is narrated by a military wife who chafes against the isolation and patriarchal gender expectations of her role on the homefront. Combining plain-spoken heartache and biting humor, these poems explore the erasure of women's labor.
Camp Damascus
By Chuck Tingle. An autistic lesbian teen discovers the horrific secrets of the ex-gay camp that dominates her small Montana community. Forget about demons—the scariest part of this tale is the smiley-face gaslighting that our heroine endures from her parents and the celebrity pastor of the town's prosperity-gospel church. An excellent fast-paced novel with humor and poetic justice served hot.
The Boy in the Rain
By Stephanie Cowell. In this bittersweet historical novel set in Edwardian England, a young painter and an aspiring socialist politician fall in love, but their idyll is overshadowed by the criminalization of homosexuality. This book stands out for its meditative, introspective prose and its insight into how the bonds of love are tested, broken, and re-created as two people mature.
The Fight Journal
By John W. Evans. The Bible may say that love keeps no record of wrongs, but when love sours, every memory becomes an entry in a ledger of unpayable claims. This painfully honest chapbook depicts competing narratives and raw emotions in the wake of an unwanted divorce. When all the blame has been divided up, and everyone has switched sides as many times as possible, love's persistence and its failures are still both mysteries to be accepted rather than understood. Winner of the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Contest.
Off the Yoga Mat
By Cheryl J. Fish. Three New York intellectuals on the cusp of their 40th birthdays fumble toward maturity as Y2K looms. Every environment in this gentle yet deep novel is fully realized—from the anarchy of the "freegans" in Tompkins Square Park, to the domestic rituals of Finnish sauna culture, and the Black community of pre-Katrina New Orleans. The protagonists' lives and loves intersect repeatedly, like complex and shifting yoga poses, hopefully leading to a bit more enlightenment by the time we reluctantly bid them goodbye.
Rocks in the River
By John Ollom. Part artists' self-help guide, part memoir of overcoming attachment wounds from his homophobic and alcoholic family, Rocks in the River is an invitation to enjoy our own creative powers without self-judgment or comparison to others. As a classically trained dancer and then an innovative choreographer, Ollom understands how the rate of a movement affects the emotions it manifests. He encourages readers not to push ourselves in a punishing way, either to heal or to make "better" art, whatever that means. Instead, we can explore towards the next stepping-stone, and the next after that, with curiosity and patience. The book is illustrated with his intuitive drawings that express the flow of pain and joy within the healing body/mind.
Everything Is Going to Be OK
By Dani Jones. This funny, inspirational webcomic, now collected in book form, addresses relatable issues such as mental health, coming out, artist's block, and keeping faith during tough times. Reminiscent of Zen Pencils, the style is cozy yet profound, like a conversation about the meaning of life that ends with a hug from a friend.
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
By Da'Shaun Harrison. This concise book combines groundbreaking theory with clear and accessible writing. Harrison surveys and ties together the myriad ways that beauty, health, and human-ness itself have been defined to exclude and shrink the Black body, with special attention to the experiences of fat Black men and trans masculine people.
The Mountain in the Sea
By Ray Nayler. This compelling hard-science thriller is set in a reshaped geopolitical environment, where humankind's aggressive harvesting of the oceans for protein may have put evolutionary pressure on octopuses to develop a civilization of comparable intelligence as ours. But rather than pitting humans against nature, the multi-layered and well-researched plot comes down to two theories of consciousness: the colonialist quest for knowledge-as-control, or empathy across the mysterious divide of self from other. The stakes are nothing less than human survival on the planet.
Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature
The Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature at the University of Florida offers 7,000 children's books to read online or download for free, spanning the 19th century to the 1950s.
Thistlefoot
By GennaRose Nethercott. In this extraordinary work of Jewish magical realism, the American great-great-grandchildren of legendary Eastern European witch Baba Yaga inherit her chicken-legged hut, and find themselves tasked with laying the ghosts of the pogroms to rest. The story is undergirded by a traditionally Jewish vision of death and the afterlife, in which being remembered by your descendants is the most important form of immortality. The Yaga descendants, whose magical powers have their hidden roots in Jewish survival skills, must do battle with the personification of genocidal forces that would erase not only a marginalized people but even the memory of their existence. And there is a traveling puppet show, and a monster-hunting band of queer rock musicians, and a lesbian romance with an animated graveyard statue. What more could you ask for?
Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders
By Joy Ladin. Lyrically written, introspective, and mystical, this soul-searching and honest memoir explores the freedom, costs, and responsibilities of becoming your true self. Poet and English professor Joy Ladin describes how she became the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish college, Yeshiva University in New York City. Through the silent suffering of growing up as the wrong gender, and the breakup of her marriage and family when she came out, Ladin drew strength from her deep connection to the enigmatic but ever-present God of the Torah, and she developed creative interpretations of Jewish tradition to make space for queer flourishing.
I’ll Meet You in Your Dreams
By Jessica Young, illustrated by Rafael López. This tender story, illustrated in rich, soothing colors, follows a brown-skinned mother and son as he grows up, has a child of his own, and feels her presence among the stars after she has become an ancestor.
The Little Mermaid
By Jerry Pinkney. Hans Christian Andersen's tragic fairy tale is reconceived by acclaimed author-illustrator Pinkney as an empowering fable about friendship, exploration, and the power of a girl's voice. Lush paintings in gold and blue tones, featuring Black characters, make this one of the most delightful retellings of a famous story. Definitely superior to the Disney version, or at least an essential text to have on hand when your child watches the movie.
My First Book of Haiku Poems
Translated by Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, illustrated by Tracy Gallup. This artistically designed, bilingual picture book features 20 poems by Japanese haiku masters such as Issa and Basho. Each poem has breathing room in its own two-page spread featuring the original Japanese verse (in script and Romaji), Ramirez-Christensen's translation, a dreamy painting reminiscent of Magritte's surreal images, and a prompt for imaginative reflection on the pairing of art and text.
The Book Rescuer
By Sue Macy, illustrated by Stacy Innerst. This inspiring picture-book biography of Aaron Lansky, founder of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, is enhanced with Chagall-inspired paintings of Jewish history. A good story in its own right, the book can also prompt educational conversations about heritage and assimilation, for children of Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds alike.
Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market 33rd Edition
"In this book, you'll find more than 500 listings for children's book markets, including publishers, literary agents, magazines, contests, and more. These listings include a point of contact, how to properly submit your work, and what categories each market accepts." Published on January 11, 2022 by Writer's Digest Books.
Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents
This annual directory from Writer's Digest lists over 1,000 agents who represent writers and their books.
Bianca Stone’s Poetry Comics
Writer and artist Bianca Stone's poetry comics, published by Factory Hollow Press, are free to read on her website. These surreal assemblages of ink drawings and collage art incorporate and enhance her evocative lyrics.
The True
By Sarah Kornfeld. A darkly humorous cautionary tale for the post-truth era, this work of narrative nonfiction recounts Kornfeld's quest to comprehend the life and death of her former lover and mentor, renowned Romanian theatre director Alexandru Darie. Passionate and enigmatic, Darie was generous with his attention but secretive about the alcohol abuse and political trauma that fatally affected his health. Visiting Romania shortly after his death in 2019, Kornfeld falls under the sway of a volatile young woman who claims to have been his girlfriend. The onset of COVID in early 2020 adds another layer of distance and mystification to their correspondence, as Kornfeld, back in America, becomes enmeshed in elaborate online negotiations to produce a book and TV series about Darie. When the whole enterprise is revealed to be a hoax, Kornfeld must face how grief led her to search for answers where there were none—a parallel to her country's plunge into simplistic conspiracy theories and quick-fix politics.
Mayweed
By Frannie Lindsay. Winner of the 2009 Word Works Washington Prize, this spare and radiant poetry collection centers on acceptance of loss. Its key figures are a beloved sister who died of cancer, and their late father, a perpetrator of incest.
The Malevolent Volume
By Justin Phillip Reed. This award-winning Black queer poet's sophomore collection gives a furious and brilliant voice to the shadow side of literary classics from Homer to Plath. The syntax of this poetry collection is thorny and twisted, and the word choice demands slow re-reading to discern the full meaning and appreciate the muscular rhythm. Reed is fond of using words that could be either nouns or verbs, placing them in such a way that you would mistake one for the other until the context becomes clear. One could see this style as a political choice in keeping with the book's passionate reclaiming of Blackness as an aesthetic. Reed is asserting that he deserves the reader's close attention. He is as important, and as intellectually accomplished, as the writers in the white literary canon that these poems deconstruct with wicked cleverness.
New Kid
By Jerry Craft. In this engaging and important middle-grade graphic novel, Black 7th-grader Jordan Banks is transplanted from his Washington Heights neighborhood to a mostly white and rich prep school in Riverdale, where he uses humor and cartooning to process the challenges of making new friends and coping with microaggressions from students and teachers.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
By Toni Morrison. This slim volume of three essays is adapted from lectures that the celebrated novelist delivered at Harvard in 1990. She asks an incisive question that will turn your traditional high school and college reading material on its head: how was the presence of a subjugated Black population a necessary foil for the development of an American literary identity of innocence, rugged individualism, and white masculinity? Rather than debating whether Twain and Hemingway should be "cancelled", so to speak, Morrison is more interested in what all texts can tell us about whiteness as a self-concept. In that way, even (or especially) problematic representation of Black characters is valuable to illuminate occluded power relations, for a key feature of whiteness is that it positions itself as universal, as the absence of race.
Trumpet
By Jackie Kay. Lyrical writing distinguishes this multivocal novel about a trans male jazz musician in 1950s-'90s Scotland and the many ways that people process the revelation of his queer identity after his death.
Break Every String
By Joshua Michael Stewart. This poetic autobiography is a blues song for the dead-end economy of Midwestern towns and the family wreckage they harbor. His characters crackle with energy that could find its outlet in verses or fists, parenting your own children or stealing someone else's, a guitar or a bottle. As the one who escaped, Stewart plays through all the octaves of emotion, from gratitude to judgmental pride, to survivor guilt, to wary compassion: "of loving/the lost with raucous praise, of letting the gone go."
How to Paint a Dead Man
By Harry Bauld. With mordant wit and erudition, the poems in this chapbook dissect artistic masterpieces from Rembrandt to Basquiat, to analyze the nature of fame, genius, and mortality. Several pieces are from the perspective of cogs in the commercial art machine—docents, consumers, or anonymous assistants to the famous painter (who are actually doing most of the work). Others remix words from news stories, textbooks, and artists' monographs, as if to warn that no body of work is immune to being decomposed.
Unmonstrous
By John Allen Taylor. Bold, tender poetry chapbook depicts a Southern childhood marked by sexual abuse from his Sunday school teacher, and the grace and gratitude he finds in reclaiming his body as part of the natural world.
Position Papers
By Andrea Lawlor. This chapbook of prose-poems is a playful and uplifting manifesto for a future society where resources are shared and identities and property are held lightly. Published by Factory Hollow Press in 2016 and now out of print, it is free to download as a PDF from their website.
13th Balloon
By Mark Bibbins. This multi-layered yet accessible book-length poem is an elegy for the author's late partner, Mark Crast, one of the many casualties of the AIDS crisis at its height in the 1980s and early 90s. From the vantage point of 2020, a middle-aged gay man looks back on the ghosts of his community and surveys a youth culture that knows of the mass devastation only as history, if at all. Brief unpunctuated lines give the poem the contemporary immediacy of a social media newsfeed, while the everyday embodiments of grief have a timeless relevance.
