Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - 2015
This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of color and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams her way home."Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's poetry book Love Cake won a Lambda Literary Award.
Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement
Shelly Oria - 2019
Christine Blasey-Ford when she testified to congress in September 2018 about the men who victimized her. A year earlier, in October 2017, the hashtag #MeToo shone a light on the internalized, normalized sexual harassment and abuse that'd been ubiquitous for women for generations.Among the first books to emerge from the #MeToo movement, Indelible in the Hippocampus is a truly intersectional collection of essays, fiction, and poetry. These original texts sound the voices of black, Latinx, Asian, queer, and trans writers, to name but a few, and says "me too" 22 times. Whether reflecting on their teenage selves or their modern-day workplaces, each contributor approaches the subject with unforgettable authenticity and strength.Together these pieces create a portrait of cultural sea-change, offering the reader a deeper understanding of this complex, galvanizing pivot in contemporary consciousness.Featuring Kaitlyn Greenidge, Melissa Febos, Syreeta McFadden, Rebecca Schiff, Diana Spechler, Hossannah Asuncion, Nelly Reifler, Courtney Zoffness, Quito Ziegler, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Jolie Holland, Lynn Melnick, Caitlin Delohery, Caitlin Donohue, Gabrielle Bellot, Karissa Chen, Elissa Schappell, Samantha Hunt, Honor Moore, Donka Kelly, and Hafizah Geter
Bestiary
K-Ming Chang - 2020
She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth–and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny.With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.
Tell It to the Bees
Fiona Shaw - 2009
and a small boy very worried.Lydia Weekes is distraught at the break-up of her marriage. When her young son, Charlie, makes friends with the local doctor, Jean Markham, her life is turned upside down.Charlie tells his secrets to no one but the bees, but even he can't keep his mother's friendship to himself. The locals don't like things done differently. As Lydia and the doctor become closer, the rumours start to fly and threaten to shatter Charlie's world.
Would You Rather? A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out
Katie Heaney - 2018
Three years later, a lot changed. For one thing, she met the right girl. Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing that she is gay. She tackles everything from the trials of dating in New York City to the growing pains of her first relationship, from obsessing over Harry Styles (because, actually, he does look a bit like a lesbian) to learning to accept herself all over again. Exploring love and sexuality with her neurotic wit and endearing intimacy, Katie shares the message that it's never too late to find love--or yourself.
Felt in the Jaw
Kristen N. Arnett - 2017
A young dancer suddenly loses language while her family struggles to understand their new roles. A mother endures a horrifying spider bite while camping with her daughters in the backyard. A family reunion goes sour when a group of cousins are left to their own devices. In these ten stories, outward strength is always betrayed by deep vulnerability: these are characters so desperate for family and connection that they often isolate themselves--and sometimes, it's the world isolating them.
Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color
Gloria E. Anzaldúa - 1990
New thought and new dialogue: a book that will teach in the most multiple sense of that word: a book that will be of lasting value to many diverse communities of women as well as to students from those communities. The authors explore a full spectrum of present concerns in over seventy pieces that vary from writing by new talents to published pieces by Audre Lorde, Joy Harjo, Norma Alarcón and Trinh T. Minh-ha."At one level or another, all the work in the collection seeks to find ways to understand and articulate our multiple identities and senses of place….Making Face/Making Soul is an exciting collection of dynamic, important writings that all women of color and white feminists will learn from, enjoy, and return to again and again and again."—Sojourner"...the pieces are stunning in what they risk and reveal..."—The San Francisco Chronicle
All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women
Enid Shomer - 2018
This anthology, spanning work of the last 75 years, will broaden its readers' notions of what defines erotic poetry. For what is more intriguing, more satisfying than strong, self-assured writing? This groundbreaking anthology includes some of our most powerful women writers--among them Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Sexton, Dorianne Laux, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, and Louise Gl�ck. These poets fully demonstrate that, far from being prurient, the erotic can permeate even the most mundane aspects of life, from reading a book to buying clothes. At the same time, the collection affirms the enormous meaningfulness of poetry--its ability to express the inexpressible and to illuminate the most private and intimate of human experiences. The poets included here represent different ethnicities, geographies, social classes, and sexual preferences. The only characteristic they share is that they are women writing about sex.
White Houses
Amy Bloom - 2018
Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick," as she's known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor. But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that Hick never expected to have.She moves into the White House, where her status as "first friend" is an open secret, as are FDR's own lovers. After she takes a job in the Roosevelt administration, promoting and protecting both Roosevelts, she comes to know Franklin not only as a great president but as a complicated rival and an irresistible friend, capable of changing lives even after his death. Through it all, even as Hick's bond with Eleanor is tested by forces both extraordinary and common, and as she grows as a woman and a writer, she never loses sight of the love of her life.From Washington, D.C. to Hyde Park, from a little white house on Long Island to an apartment on Manhattan's Washington Square, Amy Bloom's new novel moves elegantly through fascinating places and times, written in compelling prose and with emotional depth, wit, and acuity.
Macho Sluts: Erotic Fiction
Patrick Califia-Rice - 1988
Nobody had ever written so frankly about the kinky potential of woman-to-woman sex (and nobody has ever done it any better). If any book is responsible for the formation of the modern lesbian leather community, this one is it.Despite its graceful language, imaginative scenarios, and abundant humor, the lesbian press trashed Macho Sluts, and it became a focal point for the infamous legal battles between Canada Customs and Little Sister's, the gay and lesbian bookstore. But readers loved it, and to this day Macho Sluts remains a vital and moving classic that still has the power to educate, radicalize, and expand our notions of the body's potential to provide us with pleasure, pain, and love.This new edition, part of Arsenal Pulp Press' Little Sister's Classics series resurrecting classics of LGBT literature, includes a new afterword by the author, and an introduction by Wendy Chapkis, a professor of sociology and women and gender studies at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.Patrick Califia has written many books about radical sex, queer communities, and the repression of desire. Almost ten years ago, Califia transitioned from female to male; he now lives as a bisexual transman in San Francisco.
Graffiti (and Other Poems)
Savannah Brown - 2016
Written between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, with examinations of anxiety, death, first loves, and first lusts, Graffiti extends a hand to those undergoing the trials and uncertainty of teenagehood, and assures them they're not alone.
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
Eli Clare - 1999
. . . Using the language of the elemental world, he delineates a complex human intersection and transmutes cruelty into its opposite—a potent, lifegiving remedy.”—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun HomeFirst published in 1999, Exile & Pride established Eli Clare as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability. With this critical tenth-anniversary edition, the groundbreaking publication secures its position as essential to the history of queer and disability politics, and, through significant new material that boldly interrogates and advances the original text, to its future as well. Clare’s writing on his experiences as a genderqueer activist/writer with cerebral palsy permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation, and yet Exile & Pride is much too great in scope to be defined by even these two issues. Instead it offers an intersectional framework for understanding how our bodies actually experience the politics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the heart of Clare’s exploration of environmental destruction, white working-class identity, queer community, disabled sexuality, childhood sexual abuse, coalition politics, and his own gender transition is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible for everyone.Blending prose and theory, personal experience and political debate, anger and compassion, Exile & Pride provides a window into a world where our whole selves in all their complexity can be loved and accepted.An award-winning poet and essayist, Eli Clare is also the author of The Marrow’s Telling.
A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend
Emily Horner - 2010
Then Julia is killed in a sudden car accident, and while Cass is still reeling from her death, Julia’s boyfriend and her other drama friends make it their mission to bring to fruition the nearly-completed secret project: a musical about an orphaned ninja princess entitled Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad.Cass isn’t one of the drama people. She doesn’t feel at home with Julia’s drama friends, and she doesn’t see a place for her in the play. Things only get worse when she finds out that Heather Galloway, the girl who made her miserable all through middle school, has been cast as the ninja princess.Cass can’t take a summer of swallowing her pride and painting sets, so she decides to follow her original plan for a cross-country road trip with Julia. Even if she has a touring bicycle instead of a driver’s license, and even if Julia’s ashes are coming along in Tupperware.Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad is a story about friendship. About love. About traveling a thousand miles just to find yourself. About making peace with the past, and making sense of it. And it’s a story about the bloodiest high school musical one quiet suburb has ever seen.
No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir
Ani DiFranco - 2019
In these frank, honest, passionate, and often funny pages is the tale of one woman's eventful and radical journey to the age of thirty. Ani's coming of age story is defined by her ethos of fierce independence--from being an emancipated minor sleeping in a Buffalo bus station, to unwaveringly building a career through appearances at small clubs and festivals, to releasing her first album at the age of 18, to consciously rejecting the mainstream recording industry and creating her own label, Righteous Babe Records. In these pages, as in life, she never hesitates to challenge established rules and expectations, maintaining a level of artistic integrity that has impressed many and antagonized more than a few. Ani continues to be a major touring and recording artist as well as a celebrated activist and feminist, standing as living proof that you can overcome all personal and societal obstacles to be who you are and to follow your dreams.