I’m a novelist and a professor of black queer and feminist literature at Georgetown University. But the truth is, my connection to these books goes deeper than that. These books give me life. When I was a little girl, I spent more days than I can count scouring my mother’s small black feminist library in the basement of our home in Harlem, poring over the stories of girls like me: fat, black, queer girls who longed to see themselves written in literature and history. Now I get to create stories like these myself, and share them with others. It’s a dream job, and a powerful one. It thrills me every time.
This book is so expansive, Audre Lorde invented a whole new genre for it. She terms it “biomythography,” bringing together autobiography, mythology, fiction, poetry, and other forms of writing to tell her story of queer life.
I fell in love with Zamiin college back in the day and have been re-reading it ever since. From her childhood in 1930s and 40s Harlem to her coming out as the self-proclaimed fat black lesbian “warrior poet,” who would come to shape black feminism in the late 20th century and beyond, Zamicharts the life, loves, and transformative ideas of one of our most important writers.
Zamiis both muse and guide, showing us how the iconic feminist writer came to be, and how pleasure, power, creative expression, and community are indispensable to our own freedom today.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive
A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem, weak and half-blind. On she stumbles - through teenage pain and loneliness, but then to happiness in friendship, work and sex, from Washington Heights to Mexico, always changing, always strong. This is Audre Lorde's story. A rapturous, life-affirming autobiographical novel by the 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet', it changed the literary landscape.
It features the voices of over forty contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex African writers who reflect on queer life and experience. With work from renowned photographer Zanele Muholi and acclaimed writers like Olumide Popoola, Audrey Mbugua, and Pamella Dlungwana, Queer African Reader explores how queerness, trans identity, disability, feminism, and colonialism intersect on both personal and political levels.
It’s full of stories, poems, and essays that move us beyond a US-centered view of sexuality, rooting us in the complexities of queer life and the possibilities of queer freedom in Africa and beyond.
As homophobia and transphobia threaten to silence the voices of African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people, this account is a testament to the resistance and unrelenting power of these communities across Africa and its diaspora. It brings together academic writings, political analysis, life testimonies, conversations, and artistic works by Africans that engage with the struggle for LGBTI liberation. The book aims to engage the audience from the perspective that various traits of identity—such as gender, race, and class—interact to contribute to social inequality. Including experiences from diverse African contexts, this work breaks away from the homogenization of…
Justin Torres’s exquisite novel will make you want to beam and bawl and fight in all the best ways.
It tells the story of a clear-eyed, tender-hearted boy navigating a world where true safety is hard to find. As he comes of age in rural New York State in the 1980s, messages about masculinity, race, sexuality, and the expectations of family swirl around him, often violently, punctuating the world of inquisitive play he and his two older brothers create together.
We witness as Torres’s narrator fights for a vision of his own freedom, a complex fight that resists tidy endings, offering echoing truths instead.
Three brothers tear their way through childhood - smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from rubbish, hiding when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn - he's Puerto Rican, she's white. Barely out of childhood themselves, their love is a serious, dangerous thing. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins…
If you’re not familiar with Pat Parker yet, you’re in for a treat.
This collection gathers the published and unpublished writing of a badass literary powerhouse who has yet to get her full due. Written from the 1960s-1980s, Parker’s poems, stories, essays, and plays give a foundation of black queer and feminist thinking.
With striking language and irresistible humor, Parker and her irreverent characters shed light on the complexities of gender identity, state violence, nonmonogamy, pleasure, and belonging. Parker’s work is both ahead of its time and right on time, reminding us that history—and our power to shape it—are less distant than we think.
Poetry. Drama. California Interest. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. "Parker stayed woke to black suffering, violence against black bodies—especially those of black women—to the suffering engendered by multiple, egregious oppressions. With THE COMPLETE WORKS OF PAT PARKER, we are allowed an opportunity to historicize Pat Parker's significance to black women's literary traditions, lesbian erotics, to black queer struggles and black feminism, and to global social justice movements. She was in her time. Now, with this important text, she will be in all time to come." —Alexis De Veaux
"As the Black Lives Matter movement calls attention to the…
This is the kind of book you want to savor, line by line. It’s a powerful and necessary exploration of black gay writing and life in the 1980s and 1990s.
Bost transports us to the world of important writers like Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, and Melvin Dixon, showing us how their writing, their living, and their loving were all intertwined. With gorgeous, poetic prose, Bost shows how violent structures like racism, classism, homophobia, and AIDS may shape aspects of our lives, but they cannot stop our living.
Evidence of Beingexplores how these writers used their work to create community, belonging, and survival. My favorite thing about this book is that Bost gives us a vision of what he calls “black/queer optimism,” in which shared experiences and creative expression form a basis for LGBTQ+ life far into the future.
Evidence of Being opens on a grim scene: Washington DC's gay black community in the 1980s, ravaged by AIDS, the crack epidemic, and a series of unsolved murders, seemingly abandoned by the government and mainstream culture. Yet in this darkest of moments, a new vision of community and hope managed to emerge. Darius Bost's account of the media, poetry, and performance of this time and place reveals a stunning confluence of activism and the arts. In Washington and New York during the 1980s and '90s, gay black men banded together, using creative expression as a tool to challenge the widespread…
Malaya Clondon dreads when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings—preferring to paint alone in her bedroom or enjoy forbidden foods with her father. Whether navigating her predominantly white Upper East Side prep school or the stares of strangers on the street, Malaya’s weight continues to climb despite pressure tactics of her mother, grandmother, and friends. As Malaya comes of age in a rapidly gentrifying 1990s Harlem, she strains to understand “ladyness” and fit neatly within the confines of a so-called “femininity” that holds no room for her body. She finds solace in the lyrical riffs of Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah, and in the support of her sensitive father, Percy—until a family tragedy forces her to finally face the source of her hunger on her own terms.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
