Celebrate Pride Month with six works of nonfiction by queer and trans authors.
This collection contains:
Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan: Art about glaciers, queer relationships, political anxiety, and the meaning of blackness in open space—Winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Nonfiction and the 2022 Jean Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, Borealis, is a shapeshifting logbook of Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s experiences moving through the Alaskan outdoors.
Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez: A meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders.
Madder by Marco Wilkinson: Madder, matter, mater—a weed, a state of mind, a material, a meaning, a mother. Essayist and horticulturist Marco Wilkinson searches for the roots of his own selfhood among family myths and memories.
Mean by Myriam Gurba: True crime, memoir, and ghost story, Mean is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba’s coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana. This is a confident, intoxicating, brassy book that takes the cost of sexual assault, racism, misogyny, and homophobia deadly seriously.
Socialist Realism by Trisha Low: In this book-length essay, the problem of how to account for one’s life comes to the fore—sliding unpredictably between memory, speculation, self-criticism, and art criticism, Low seeks answers that she knows she won’t find. Attempting to reconcile her desires with her radical politics, she asks: do our quests to fulfill our deepest wishes propel us forward, or keep us trapped in the rubble of our deteriorating world?
Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through by T Fleischmann: How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? In this winner of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s artworks—piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles—as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality.