Adult Nonfiction

14 Writers - 14 Stories - 14 Truths

The stories contained within this anthology were almost never written. Each contributing author dug deep to discover the one thing they’d avoided writing about and made the brave decision to speak their truth. But they didn’t stop there. Every essay in this collection also includes a companion piece, a “behind-the-scenes” look at what it took to move through the struggle, shame, self-doubt, fear, and more to put these words to the page.

Avoided No More reminds us that we all have stories buried within us, that there’s power in sharing our truth, and, perhaps most importantly, that none of us are truly alone on this journey.

Contributors:

Katie Boateng, Federica Bruniera, Becka Eppley, Serine Goodmond, Amanda Conley Hines, Jinx Malcolm, Kim Marsh, Lyda Michopoulou, Nicki Pappas, Tina Strawn, Therese Temitayo, Asha Unni, Laura Vegh and Maria Wade

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Published by Plymouth James Press, an imprint of The Open Book Company

This inclusive, straightforward guide to fertility is What to Expect Before You’re Expecting for families outside the heterosexual nuclear family model—perfect for LGBTQ+ and solo parents who want to have kids but don’t know where to start.   
 
In Baby Making for Everybody, queer millennial midwives Ray Rachlin and Marea Goodman use their professional expertise to demystify the dizzying process of pursuing parenthood as queer and solo people, offering detailed, gender-affirming, body-positive advice on topics including:
* Fertility tracking for people with uteruses
* Choosing a sperm donor, egg donor, or surrogate
* Legal considerations for LGBTQ+ families
* Navigating pregnancy and gender identity
* IUI, ICI, and IVF procedures
* Foster parenting and adoption
* Miscarriage and infertility

 
The result is a much-needed compassionate step-by-step guide for every aspect of the complicated, messy, and glorious process of building a family. Combining practical information with personal narratives and first-person community wisdom, this book provides prospective parents with the information they need to grow their families.

In Backwoods Witchcraft, Jake Richards offers up a folksy stew of family stories, lore, omens, rituals, and conjure crafts that he learned from his great-grandmother, his grandmother, and his grandfather, a Baptist minister who Jake remembers could "rid someone of a fever with an egg or stop up the blood in a wound." The witchcraft practiced in Appalachia is very much a folk magic of place, a tradition that honors the seen and unseen beings that inhabit the land as well as the soil, roots, and plant life.

The materials and tools used in Appalachia witchcraft are readily available from the land. This "grounded approach" will be of keen interest to witches and conjure folk regardless of where they live. Readers will be guided in how to build relationships with the spirits and other beings that dwell around them and how to use the materials and tools that are readily available on the land where one lives.

This book also provides instructions on how to create a working space and altar and make conjure oils and powders. A wide array of tried-and-true formulas are also offered for creating wealth, protecting one from gossip, spiritual cleansing, and more.

TENTH ANNIVERSARY LIMITED COLLECTOR’S EDITION

Roxane Gay's New York Times bestselling debut collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism—a modern classic from one of the most prominent voices of her generation—is now available in a beautifully designed Tenth anniversary limited edition, with a stunning foil cover and hot pink sprayed edges, the perfect collector’s edition for her fans

“Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink—all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I’m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.”

In these funny and insightful essays, Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.

Roxane Gay’s groundbreaking Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better, from a writer whose mark on our culture continues to be made.

These “very funny-deep dives into the lives of the most dastardly queer people in history” offer a passionate argument for rethinking gay politics beyond identity (Vogue).

What can we learn from the homosexual villains, failures, and baddies of our past?

We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveal more than we might expect? Many popular histories seek to establish homosexual heroes, pioneers, and martyrs but, as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked despite their being informative and instructive.

Based on the hugely popular podcast series of the same name, Bad Gays asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains, failures, and baddies. With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian, anthropologist Margaret Mead and notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors tell the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. They examine a cast of kings, fascist thugs, artists and debauched bon viveurs. Imperial-era figures Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Casement get a look-in, as do FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn, and architect Philip Johnson.

Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge mainstream assumptions about sexual identity: showing that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the 19th century, one central to major historical events.

Bad Gays is a passionate argument for rethinking gay politics beyond questions of identity, compelling readers to search for solidarity across boundaries.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre, an eye-opening and galvanizing look at the current state of anti-racist activism across America.

In the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offered a vital guide for how to talk about important issues of race and racism in society. In Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, she discussed the ways in which white male supremacy has had an impact on our systems, our culture, and our lives throughout American history. But now that we better understand these systems of oppression, the question is this: What can we do about them?

With Be A Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—and How You Can, Too, Oluo aims to show how people across America are working to create real positive change in our structures. Looking at many of our most powerful systems—like education, media, labor, health, housing, policing, and more—she highlights what people are doing to create change for intersectional racial equity. She also illustrates various ways in which the reader can find entryways into change in these same areas, or can bring some of this important work being done elsewhere to where they live.

This book aims to not only be educational, but to inspire action and change. Oluo wishes to take our conversations on race and racism out of a place of pure pain and trauma, and into a place of loving action. Be A Revolution is both an urgent chronicle of this important moment in history, as well as an inspiring and restorative call for action.

"Be Better Broken: In Service to Liberation" is a vital essay collection and guide for everyone resisting fascism. It recognizes and honors those on the front lines as traumatized people doing work that further traumatizes us as we yearn for transformation. This book is call to claim responsibility for our lives and our roles in building a collectively liberated world. By providing practical steps and deep insight it transforms our shared pain into a foundation for action.

The dream of a queer separatist town. The life of a gay and Jewish Nazi-fighter. A gender reveal party that tears apart reality. These are the just some of the comics you'll find in this massive queer comics anthology from The Nib.

Be Gay, Do Comics is filled with dozens of comics about LGBTQIA experiences, ranging from personal stories to queer history to cutting satire about pronoun panic and brands desperate to co-opt pride. Brimming with resilience, inspiration, and humor, an incredible lineup of top indie cartoonists takes you from the American Revolution through Stonewall to today's fights for equality and representation.

Featuring more than 30 cartoonists including Hazel Newlevant, Joey Alison Sayers, Maia Kobabe, Matt Lubchansky, Breena Nuñez, Sasha Velour, Shing Yin Khor, Levi Hastings, Mady G, Bianca Xunise, Kazimir Lee, and many, many more!

Sometimes it pays to be gay and do crime.

As communities are boldly rising to challenge capitalism, white supremacy, and authoritarianism, Be Gay, Do Crime: Everyday Acts of Queer Resistance and Rebellion is your ultimate guide to LGBTQ+ resilience and rebellion. Packed with daily snapshots of radical queer history, this book celebrates the bold, the brave, and the beautifully defiant moments that have shaped the fight for justice.

Ever wonder why the Stonewall protests became an uprising or what the earliest acts of queer resistance looked like? How about the ways queer communities have organized against oppression across the globe? Be Gay, Do Crime dives into these stories and so many more—from fierce acts of resistance to joyful victories—bringing to life the rich, diverse history of LGBTQ+ liberation.

By situating readers within a larger pattern of struggle, these everyday acts counter the erasure of queer people from history and serve as a reminder that our struggles are part of a broader fight against systemic violence and dehumanization.

But, this isn’t just a history book; it’s a rallying cry. Flip to any page, soak up some inspiration, and join the legacy of resistance.

'Phenomenal ... Offers us possibilities for rescuing the concept of democracy from its fatal entanglement with racial, heteropatriarchal capitalism'—Angela Y. Davis

'Embraces the unruliness of collective struggle, and recognizes freedom not as a destination but practice—an abolitionist, feminist, anticapitalist, antiracist, radically inclusive practice'—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

'A compelling and inspiring book that belongs in our movements and our classrooms'—Chandra Talpade Mohanty, author of Feminism Without Borders

'An elegantly written masterpiece'—Barbara Ransby, author of Making All Black Lives Matter

Become Ungovernable is a provocative new work of political thought setting out to reclaim “freedom”, “justice”, and “democracy”, revolutionary ideas that are all too often warped in the interests of capital and the state. Revealing the mirage of mainstream democratic thought and the false promises of liberal political ideologies, H.L.T. Quan offers an alternative approach: an abolition feminism drawing on a kaleidoscope of refusal praxes, and on a deep engagement with the Black Radical Tradition and queer analytics.

With each chapter anchored by episodes from the long history of resistance and rebellions against tyranny, Quan calls for us to take up a feminist ethic of living rooted in the principles of radical inclusion, mutuality and friendship as part of the larger toolkit for confronting fascism, white supremacy, and the neoliberal labor regime.

H.L.T. Quan is a political theorist, award-winning filmmaker and Associate Professor of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Quan is the author of Growth Against Democracy and editor of Cedric J. Robinson.

In honor of the journey Nicki and Stephen Pappas have been on individually and together, they wrote Becoming Egalitarian. In Becoming Egalitarian, they examine their limited (and limiting) beliefs about marriage and gender roles. They begin with why they were drawn to complementarianism and explore how their theology shifted to egalitarianism.

Becoming Egalitarian is their story, but it’s not just their story. There are untold numbers of people who have been harmed by religious ideologies that prop up unhealthy power dynamics. Nicki and Stephen found that by actively dismantling the hierarchy in their relationship, they could become true partners. Becoming Egalitarian isn’t an answer book. Rather, it is a vulnerable and authentic exploration of how to find a healthier partnership when operating from a place of mutuality.

"With a thoughtful introduction by Mikki Kendall, it will remind you why she was loved, honored, challenged and respected." - Ms. Magazine

“This new collection is essential reading for both longtime readers of hooks and new fans seeking to learn more about her groundbreaking contributions to cultural and intellectual movements.” - Electric Lit

"Wide-ranging and insightful, this makes for a solid primer on hooks’s ideas." --Publishers Weekly

"I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance."
—bell hooks

bell hooks was a prolific, trailblazing author, feminist, social activist, cultural critic, and professor. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell used her pen name to center attention on her ideas and to honor her courageous great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.

hooks’s unflinching dedication to her work carved deep grooves for the feminist and anti-racist movements. In this collection of 7 interviews, stretching from early in her career until her last interview, she discusses feminism, the complexity of rap music and masculinity, her relationship to Buddhism, the “politic of domination,” sexuality, and love and the importance of communication across cultural borders. Whether she was sparking controversy on campuses or facing criticism from contemporaries, hooks relentlessly challenged herself and those around her, inserted herself into the tensions of the cultural moment, and anchored herself with love.

All are made in the image and likeness of God. If this is what we believe, then trans people, like all people, reflect something of God, and not just in the ways that they share in common with others, but also in the ways that they are different. They remind us that God is beyond all of our categories, even gender. In this book, Tara Soughers explores theology from the position of a trans ally-a parent of a trans young adult as well as priest. What does it mean about God and about humans, that there is not a strict gender binary? How can we affirm and include what we have learned about the permeability of boundaries to affirm those whose path does not follow traditional cultural stereotypes, and how might the broadening help us to understand the God who is never two for Christians, but both one and three? What gifts does this broader understanding bring to the church?

From bestselling author Martha Beck, a new path to overcoming anxiety by awakening the creativity within

We live in an epidemic of anxiety. Most of us assume that the key to overcoming it is to think our way out. And for a while it works. But there is always something that sends us back into the anxious spiral we’ve been trying to climb out of.

In Beyond Anxiety, Dr. Martha Beck explains why anxiety is skyrocketing around you, and likely within you. She also tells you how to not only reduce your anxiety but use it to propel you into a life filled with peace, meaning, and joy.

Using a combination of the latest neuroscience as well as her background in sociology and coaching, Beck explains how our brains tend to get stuck in an “anxiety spiral,” a feedback system that can increase anxiety indefinitely. To climb out, we must engage different parts of our nervous system—the parts involved in creativity. Beck provides instructions for engaging the “creativity spiral,” in a process that not only shuts down anxiety but leads to innovative problem solving, a sense of meaning and purpose, and joyful, intimate connection with others—and with the world.

The opposite of anxiety, it turns out, is a wonderful new way of life—one that can calm and inspire us as individuals and help us become a source of healing for everything around us.