Adult Nonfiction

By: Chris Tompkins (Author), 2021, Paperback

No matter who we are or where we come from, we all play on the same playground. There are certain collective societal messages we hear growing up that we either consciously or subconsciously believe. As a result, we develop certain belief systems from which we operate our lives.

Raising LGBTQ Allies sheds light on the deeper, multi-faceted layers of homophobia. It opens up a conversation with parents around the possibility they may have an LGBTQ child, and shows how heteronormativity can be harmful if not addressed clearly and early. Although not every parent will have an LGBTQ child, their child will jump rope or play tag with a child who is LGBTQ.

By showing readers the importance of having open and authentic conversations with children at a young age, Chris Tompkins walks parents through the many ways they can prevent new generations from adopting homophobic and transphobic beliefs, while helping them explore their own subconscious biases.

Offering specific actions parents, family members, and caregivers can take to help navigate conversations, address heteronormativity, and challenge societal beliefs, Raising LGBTQ Allies serves as a guide to help normalize being LGBTQ from a young age. Creating allies and a world where closets don't exist happens one child at a time. And it begins with each of us and what we say, as much as what we choose not to say.

In Reclaiming Church, J.J. Warren continues his call to reaffirm the Church be welcoming to all, including young people like those he led at Sarah Lawrence College who “didn’t know God could love them because their churches said God didn’t.”

The book addresses three points of importance to young people looking to be part of a church community, and a call:
1. The identity and nature of God
2. The role of Scripture in discerning God’s call
3. The author’s own experience of God, church, and identity

In the final chapter, “We Are the Church,” Warren focuses on practical and positive steps for joining voices, being heard, building bridges, and working together for young people to reclaim Church in their lives.
Key Features
• Affirms to the LGBTQ community and those who love them that the Church is for all.
• Inspires younger progressive people to stay within the Church and work to renew the call of ministry.
• Explores the Church’s beginnings and emphasis on community.
• Calls readers to focus on practical and positive steps to reclaim Church in their lives.

Winner of the 2023 Prose Award in Cultural Anthropology and SociologyFinalist for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction

A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations.

Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them.

Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí’skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person.

Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism’s written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed—and Indigenous resistance is core to this story. Reclaiming Two-Spirits amplifies their voices, reconnecting their history to Native nations in the 21st century.

By Nicki Pappas, 2022, Paperback

signed, poetry 

By: Juan-Carlos Perez-Cortes (Author), Amanda Foy (Translator), 2022, Paperback

One of the best-selling books on relationships in Europe during the last two years, studied and debated by consensual non-monogamy activists and polyamory discussion groups, has been translated and adapted here to bring to the English-speaking audience a less self-centered and more radical framework for sustainable interpersonal relations based on intense communication and free, conscientious commitments.


The proposal was born in Sweden in 2005, was developed over 15 years, and then this title was originally published in Spain in the spring of 2020. Since then, one edition after another has sold out (in 2023, the fifth Spanish edition will hit the bookstores), and translations into other languages and publishing projects in other countries have been released, showing that there was and still is a global need to know and understand alternative structures when it comes to relating to each other.


The most enthusiastic reception of this monograph has been in those communities already interested in these relational alternatives to the hegemonic monogamous system and groups more focused on lifestyle-politics activism of anti-patriarchal, anarchist and anti-capitalist inspiration. Reading sessions, analysis courses, seminars, and workshops of varied scopes, extensions, and approaches have been organized. Likewise, these topics have been collected in press articles, radio and TV programs, interviews, podcasts, and other digital and printed formats. This translation maintains most of the original content, adapting only the necessary contextual elements so that English-speaking readers can interpret the examples, references, comparisons, and anecdotes with greater familiarity.



The book's audience covers various profiles regarding age, gender, sexual orientation and preferences, geographical and socio-cultural origin, etc. One reason is that the work brings together both visions: political and relational. It historically structures the elements leading to the emergence of this framework, starting with the philosophical and political theoretical foundations, the freethought tradition, social developments, feminist, queer, sex-positive activisms, etc., while also addressing more personal aspects.


The feedback from readers suggests that this volume has inspired and helped them not to "feel like weirdos" and to have pride and confidence in their decisions and choices regarding relationships.

By: Tricia Hersey (Author), 2022, Hardcover

***INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER***

Disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy. In this book, Tricia Hersey, aka The Nap Bishop, encourages us to connect to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice.

What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine‑level pace –– feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit.

Have you ever messed up or failed? No? Okay, then fuck off. There's no book for you that exists. But if you happen to be one of those select human beings that feels like they may have screwed the pooch a couple times, this book could do you some good. After talking to many other people who have met failure in an intimate way, Brene Brown, PhD. writes about tangible ways to not only approach failure, but owning that failure and kicking its ass. Whether it's looking for a way back up onto that horse, or just needing to read a couple stories that make you feel better about your situation, Rising Strong has you and every other loser in mind.

From the historic streets of Charleston, where flooding tides now rise with alarming frequency, Pulitzer Prize finalist Tony Bartelme takes readers deep into the heart of the climate crisis. With the eye of an investigative reporter and the soul of a storyteller, Bartelme makes the invisible visible-whether it's carbon dioxide drifting from a tailpipe, disappearing plankton beneath the waves, or the subtle collapse of ecosystems we barely understand.

Rising Waters is a story of science, wonder, and urgency. Traveling from the Lowcountry to Greenland, the Sahara, and beyond, Bartelme introduces readers to NASA scientists, Inuit shamans, coral whisperers, and chemical detectives, all working to decode the planet's fever. And he always brings it back home-to the marshes, reefs, and communities of the American Southeast, where the battle between water and land is no longer possible to ignore.

This book is a call to see clearly, think deeply, and act meaningfully-before more of our world slips beneath the surface.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“A vivid account of a remarkable life.” —The Washington Post

In this comprehensive, revelatory biography—fifteen years of interviews and research in the making—historian Jane Sherron De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, and her meticulous jurisprudence.

At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs is her Jewish background, specifically the concept of tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to “repair the world,” with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II.

Ruth’s journey begins with her mother, who died tragically young but whose intellect inspired her daughter’s feminism. It stretches from Ruth’s days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School to Cornell University to Harvard and Columbia Law Schools; to becoming one of the first female law professors in the country and having to fight for equal pay and hide her second pregnancy to avoid losing her job; to becoming the director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and arguing momentous anti-sex discrimination cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

All this, even before being nominated in 1993 to become the second woman on the Court, where her crucial decisions and dissents are still making history. Intimately, personably told, this biography offers unprecedented insight into a pioneering life and legal career whose profound mark on American jurisprudence, American society, and our American character and spirit will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and beyond.

REVISED AND UPDATED WITH A NEW AFTERWORD

By: Melville House (Editor), 2020, Paperback

The newest entry in the increasingly popular series collects fascinating and in-depth interviews with Bill Moyers, Nina Totenberg, and more, and conversations (with Antonin Scalia and high school students) from throughout the long, ground-breaking career of one of the greatest, most influential, and most exciting legal minds in American history.

From her start in Depression-era New York, to her final days at the pinnacle of the American legal system, Ruth Bader Ginsburg defied convention, blazing a trail that helped bring greater equality to women, and to all Americans. In this collection of in-depth interviews -- including her last, as well as one of her first -- Ginsburg details her rise from a Brooklyn public school to becoming the second woman on the United States Supreme Court, and her non-stop fight for gender equality along the way. Besides telling the story behind many of her famous court battles, she also talks openly about motherhood and her partnership with her beloved husband, her Jewishness, her surprising friendship with her legal polar opposite Justice Antonin Scalia, her passion for opera, and, in one of the collection's most charming interviews, offers advice to high school students wondering about the law. It is, in the end, both an engrossing look into a fascinating life, and an inspiring tribute to an American icon.

By Catherine Connell, 2014, Paperback

How do gay and lesbian teachers negotiate their professional and sexual identities at work, given that these identities are constructed as mutually exclusive, even as mutually opposed? Using interviews and other ethnographic materials from Texas and California, School’s Out explores how teachers struggle to create a classroom persona that balances who they are and what’s expected of them in a climate of pervasive homophobia. Catherine Connell’s examination of the tension between the rhetoric of gay pride and the professional ethic of discretion insightfully connects and considers complicating factors, from local law and politics to gender privilege. She also describes how racialized discourses of homophobia thwart challenges to sexual injustices in schools. Written with ethnographic verve, School’s Out is essential reading for specialists and students of queer studies, gender studies, and educational politics.

Unlock the secrets of successful Southern gardening with this comprehensive guide that tackles the unique challenges of growing in the South's distinctive climate. From mastering the region's infamous humidity to understanding soil types and proper drainage, this detailed handbook covers everything you need to know. The book spans 16 information-packed chapters addressing crucial topics like plant selection, soil health, watering techniques, pest management, and garden design. Perfect for newcomers to Southern gardening or experienced gardeners seeking to refine their skills, it provides practical knowledge gained from real-world experience. Learn essential techniques for pruning, propagation, and creating beautiful shade gardens, while discovering how to work with the South's six distinct growing seasons. Whether you're tending a small balcony garden or managing a sprawling country plot, this thorough guide offers tested wisdom to help you cultivate a thriving Southern garden.