Collection: Shop Queer

If you lifted this book from the shelf, you're probably interested in learning more about gender. You could be in the earliest stages of questioning, newly out, well into your transition, or an ally hoping to receive some extra tips and tricks. No matter your starting point, you're in the right place.

Moving beyond pronouns, the basics of social and physical transition and how to be a good ally, this definitive guide explores the ins and outs of gender - from affirming language, how to explore and question gender, coming out to parents, finding gender euphoria, supporting loved ones and yourself, and advice on what not to say - to help you understand the nuances of gender and the lived realities of trans people. With self-reflective exercises, personal anecdotes and example scenarios, this book will teach you the secrets to becoming the best gender ally you can be.

Written by a young black queer trans adult, this empowering and contemporary guide is your 'gender friend' who is ready to actively listen, advise you as needed, and provide you with support as you grow as an ally, or approach the next steps in your own unique gender journey. Welcome to the gender book you've been waiting for.

Embrace the Queerness of your family, take ownership of your journey, and use your voice to bring light to your communities.

When Nia Chiaramonte came out as a trans woman to her wife Katie, she knew she would be met with a loving response. But she was less sure where this would leave their relationship, their marriage, and their family. Even murkier was what would happen when they began to bring their extended family, friends, and broader community alongside them on their journey of identity formation as a Queer family. They needed a guide for what lay ahead.

Now, drawing on their own experiences as well as their expertise in psychology, spirituality, and family systems, Nia and Katie Chiaramonte offer the tools they wish they'd had for their journey. Embracing Queer Family is a guidebook for Queer families on how to live into their true selves and strengthen their communities through radical love, acceptance, and mutual healing. With hands-on tools for learning and reflection in each chapter, this needed resource tackles issues of inclusion and acceptance and offers practical advice for how individuals and families can honor themselves and find transformation for their whole community through love.

Whether you are a Queer person on the journey of self-awareness, an ally looking for resources, or a family member seeking advice for how to navigate a loved one's coming-out process, this book is for you.

Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry

Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney's fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts--copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of "docu-poetry."

The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the "insurgent sensualist," hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: "I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead . . ."

The tenderness of a father's handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl's fountainhead takes over every page. "One yellaw gal with an all-black tongue has gone missing." Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day.

After a chance meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris in 1924, Harvard University scholar and activist F. O. Matthiessen and artist Russell Cheney fell in love and remained inseparable until Cheney's death in 1945. During the intervening years, the men traveled throughout Europe and the United States, achieving great professional success while contending with serious personal challenges, including addiction, chronic disease, and severe depression.

During a hospital stay, years into their relationship, Matthiessen confessed to Cheney that "never once has the freshness of your life lost any trace of its magic for me. Every day is a new discovery of your wealth." Situating the couple's private correspondence alongside other sources, Scott Bane tells the remarkable story of their relationship in the context of shifting social dynamics in the United States. From the vantage point of the present day, with marriage equality enacted into law, Bane provides a window into the realities faced by same-sex couples in the early twentieth century, as they maintained relationships in the face of overt discrimination and the absence of legal protections.

Two-Spirit Indigiqueer psychotherapist and cultural theorist Dr. Roger Kuhn illuminates the ways our bodies offer portals to our own liberation.

Experience somacultural liberation: A revolutionary ideology to explore how our bodies offer portals to personal and collective freedom.

What role does dominant culture play in how we experience the sensations, thoughts, feelings, and deeper existential mysteries of our bodies?

Dr. Roger Kuhn, a Poarch Creek Two-Spirit Indigequeer activist, artist, sex therapist, and somacultural theorist, believes that Two-Spirit people hold a unique perspective--and that viewing our bodies through a somacultural lens can help us better understand how dominant culture informs and, all too often, misinforms our relationship to it.

Somacultural liberation is an embodied practice that helps people connect with the intersections of their identity. Kuhn's revolutionary mode of inquiry illuminates the full impact of our cultural reality in shaping both our individual and shared sense of self.

The history and experiences of Native American peoples and those who identify as Two-Spirit offer the reader a path to access the full brilliance of their body. Including growth work activities, cultural assessment exercises, mindfulness practices, and nervous system regulation techniques, Somacultural Liberation provides readers with the tools and skills needed to transcend any challenges they may face in their lives.

Straddling colonial imposition and tribal significance, Two-Spirit identity offers a powerful decolonizing framework to achieve freedom and navigate the toxic systems of domination that impose upon the precious truth of who we are.

In this queer coming-of-age teen graphic novel by breakout talent Alex Assan, high schooler Rotem feels herself growing apart from her friends in a million inexpressible ways. But an unexpected connection with another student makes her feel more herself than ever before. This incisive and stunningly gorgeous debut is perfect for fans of Bloom and Gender Queer.

Rotem is a Sunhead, a fan of the international smash hit Sunrise series of books and films. She's obsessed with the story's love interest, Edmund, and no one else gets it. But all that changes when she befriends Ayala, a shy classmate and avid book lover who's as swept away by the romance as she is. The two become fast friends, but as their deep connection grows stronger, Rotem starts to wonder: What exactly draws her to this story?

Alex Assan's debut, Sunhead, is an earnest coming-of-age graphic novel that explores how the stories we love help us understand our friendships, our relationships, and ourselves.

"Will have readers tumbling through the pages . . . Deeply immersive, full of both heft and humor." --Soman Chainani, New York Times bestselling author of The School for Good and Evil series

* "One of those special books that only comes around every so often . . . An absolute revelation." --SLJ (starred review)

For fans of Nevermoor and Howl's Moving Castle comes an epic fantasy about a girl with the ability to unlock anything--including the empire's darkest secrets.

Melanie Gate is a foundling with a peculiar talent for opening the unopenable--any lock releases at the touch of her hand. One night, her orphanage is visited by Traveler, a gearling automaton there on behalf of his magical mistress, who needs an apprentice pronto. When Melanie is selected because of her gift, her life changes in a flash, and in more ways than she knows--because Traveler is not at all what he seems. But then, neither is Melanie Gate.

So begins an epic adventure sparkling with magic, wit, secret identities, stinky cats, fierce orphan girls, impostor boys, and a foundling and gearling hotly pursued by the most powerful and dangerous wizard in the land.

Action-packed yet layered, The Lock-Eater is a mix of lush world-building, high stakes, humor, and emotional heft--a page-turner and so much more.

"A new classic . . . Perfect for fans of Ursula LeGuin and Diana Wynne Jones." --Eliot Schrefer, author of The Lost Rainforest series
* "Startlingly deep [while] maintaining its swift pace." --BCCB (starred review)
"Will delight . . . An entertaining page-turner." --GeekMom
"Incredibly memorable . . Vibrant [and] skillfully wrought." --Betsy Bird for a Fuse #8 Production/SLJ
"Inventive and lighthearted [yet still] plumbs areas of darkness and loss." --The Horn Book
"Expansive adventure, intricate worldbuilding, and a memorable cast [will] immerse readers." --PW
"A magical world unlike any other." --Cracking the Cover

Becoming who you are is a journey, and all journeys start somewhere. In a collection of stories from across the spectrum of real-life experience, nine members of the trans community share their inspirational childhood stories. These are tales of questioning, affirming, transitioning, and growing up; courageous, gripping accounts from musicians, actors, teachers, scientists, forest rangers, and activists of how they overcame their unique challenges to become who they truly are. Featuring work by HAZEL NEWLEVANT, LILAH STURGES, CYNTHIA YUAN CHENG, KAMERON WHITE, SUNMI, and many more!

AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION 2021 STONEWALL HONOR BOOK

Meet Kimberly, a regular suburban housewife and mother, whose discovery later in life that she was born intersex fuelled her to become an international human rights defender and globally-recognised activist.

Charting her intersex discovery and her journey to self-acceptance, this book movingly portrays how being intersex impacted Kimberly's personal and family life, as well as her career. From uncovering a secret that was intentionally kept from her, to coming out to her family and friends and fighting for intersex rights, her candid and empowering story helps breakdown barriers and misconceptions of intersex people and brings to light the trauma and harmful impact medical intervention continues to have on the intersex community.

Written from a non-queer perspective, and filled with much-needed, straightforward information and advice about what it means to be intersex, this is a vital and timely resource for intersex people and their families, as well as the general reader.

What if you discovered the entire concept of a gender binary is nothing more than an illusion? The idea that humans fall into one of two gender categories is largely a construct created by those who benefit from that belief. More expansive ideas of gender have always existed.

In the second book of the Queer History Project, The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie: Infinite Identities around the World, author Lee Wind uses historical evidence and primary sources--poetry, ancient burial sites, firsthand accounts, and news stories--to explore gender roles and identities. Gender is as diverse as the human experience. Get ready to shatter those preconceived notions of a gender binary and dive deep into expressions of gender--both past and present--that reveal that the gender binary really is a big lie.

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective--the tropes, the presumptions--Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.

"I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body," Brookins writes. "Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I'm perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can't change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says 'female, ' and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean--to be a girl-turned-man when you're something else entirely?"

Informed by KB Brookins's personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency--whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as "other"

Teach your child that everyone should be included and celebrated.

Being inclusive is a choice we can make every day! Being inclusive means reaching out to and welcoming all people and everything that makes them who they are. When we learn to see the beauty in our differences, we can embrace the rich, diverse, and amazing world we live in together!

Meet A Kids Co., a new kind of media company with a collection of beautifully designed books that kickstart challenging, empowering, and important conversations for kids and their grownups. Learn more about us at akidsco.com.

Teach your child that our differences make us unique and are to be celebrated.

People often ask, what does it mean to be transgender? The truth is there isn't one answer. Gender is uniquely beautiful, and each person's experience is individual to them. But at its core, it's all about knowing who you are and having the courage, freedom, and support to live life being your truest self.
Meet A Kids Co., a new kind of media company with a collection of beautifully designed books that kickstart challenging, empowering, and important conversations for kids and their grownups. Learn more about us at akidsco.com.

A lyrical, genre-bending coming-of-age tale featuring a queer, Black, Guyanese American woman who, while seeking to define her own place in the world, negotiates an estranged relationship with her father.

A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.

In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh writes toward a tender vision of the world, offering children's radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. In order to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and begin to orient ourselves toward more equitable and revolutionary paths.

The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood, complicating the stark binaries that shape contemporary U.S. discourse. With nuance and generosity, Singh reveals the connections among the crises humanity faces--climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism--inviting us to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.

A 2023 YALSA Great Graphic Novels for Teens Selection

In Other Boys, debut author Damian Alexander delivers a moving middle grade graphic memoir about his struggles with bullying, the death of his mother, and coming out.

Damian is the new kid at school, and he has a foolproof plan to avoid the bullying that's plagued him his whole childhood: he's going to stop talking. Starting on the first day seventh grade, he won't utter a word. If he keeps his mouth shut, the bullies will have nothing to tease him about--right?

But Damian's vow of silence doesn't work--his classmates can tell there's something different about him. His family doesn't look like the kind on TV: his mother is dead, his father is gone, and he's being raised by his grandparents in a low-income household. And Damian does things that boys aren't supposed do, like play with Barbies instead of GI Joe. Kids have teased him about this his whole life, especially other boys. But if boys can be so cruel, why does Damian have a crush on one?