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A memoir and mythography of a Black trans man’s journey from Baby Girl to Black Boi, through gender, race, and trans theory made personal

In a country built on the daily oppression and incarceration of Black people, on the rejection of queer and trans rights, how does a Black trans man become himself or find home? “Home is commonly understood as a place of bodily safety, a place where one can find themselves a resting place, but for me and for many Black queer folk, our bodies most often preclude any home-making with those kinds of securities.” It is this reality that spurred Kai Marshall Green's investigation into bodies—and the love between them—discounted by the mainstream as deviant, deficient, and defective.

In his powerful debut memoir, Green recounts his lifelong transition from “Baby Girl" to “Black Boi,” his current and future self. Laced through his accounts of traversing discrimination, misunderstanding, and abuse from family, society, and academia are experiments in letter writing and biomythography, continuing in the literary tradition of Audre Lorde. Through A Body Made Home, Green explores the long, stuttering arc of transition as a Black queer person in America, recasting visions of home, narratives of metamorphosis, and dreams of freedom.

A Finalist for the 2023 YALSA Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award.

Rex Ogle’s companion to Free Lunch and Punching Bag weaves humor, heartbreak, and hope into life-affirming poems that honor his grandmother’s legacy.

In his award-winning memoir Free Lunch, Rex Ogle’s abuela features as a source of love and support. In this companion-in-verse, Rex captures and celebrates the powerful presence a woman he could always count on―to give him warm hugs and ear kisses, to teach him precious words in Spanish, to bring him to the library where he could take out as many books as he wanted, and to offer safety when darkness closed in. Throughout a coming of age marked by violence and dysfunction, Abuela’s red-brick house in Abilene, Texas, offered Rex the possibility of home, and Abuela herself the possibility for a better life.

Abuela, Don’t Forget Me is a lyrical portrait of the transformative and towering woman who believed in Rex even when he didn’t yet know how to believe in himself.

Starred Review from Booklist, “this powerful account will comfort those who grew up feeling broken.”

What does love look like when you are not interested in sex?

Growing up, Caitlin Cook knew the recipe for social success from watching television and reading books: two best friends, two enemies, and a boyfriend. So she arranged her life accordingly: making friends and dreaming of the boys she met in school.

But she felt that inside, something was wrong with her. Because though she wanted to get close to people, every time she experimented with sex, she just felt bored.

This graphic novel follows Caitlin Cook, who is asexual but does not yet fully realize it. From evangelical purity politics to the footloose college campus, Caitlin navigates different worlds each with their own sexual orthodoxies, and clumsily attempts to fit into each of them. A thoughtful and immersive coming-of-age memoir about one girl's struggle to figure out and then claim her asexual identity.

Written by Oscar Wilde's only grandson, After Oscar recounts the gripping story of Wilde and his enduring legacy.

"Fascinating...A magnificent blend of scholarship and memoir and a vital contribution to Wildeana."--Stephen Fry, actor and author

Oscar Wilde died in November 1900, exiled in Paris, his reputation in tatters, exhausted by scandal and prison life. While the details of his life in the limelight are well known, often ignored are the reverberations of the Wilde scandal over the decades following his trial and death.

With pathos, humor, and his grandfather's signature wit, Merlin Holland charts the extraordinary afterlife of the legendary writer and thinker, tracing the dramatic fluctuations in Wilde's posthumous reputation.

A true feat of storytelling and scholarship, After Oscar documents decades of sensationalist conjecture surrounding the Wilde family and exposes a century of bigotry and hypocrisy within the cultural establishment. Here is a book that will amuse, infuriate, fascinate, and shock. Readers beware--you're in for a Wilde ride.

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue explores their childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia.

A New York Times Bestseller!
Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, Today Show, and MSNBC feature stories

From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.

Both a primer for teens eager to be allies as well as a reassuring testimony for young queer men of color, All Boys Aren't Blue covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent, and Black joy. Johnson's emotionally frank style of writing will appeal directly to young adults. (Johnson used he/him pronouns at the time of publication.)

Velshi Banned Book Club
Indie Bestseller
Teen Vogue Recommended Read
Buzzfeed Recommended Read
People Magazine Best Book of the Summer
A New York Library Best Book of 2020
A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2020 ... and more!

In her first nonfiction book in a decade, the #1 bestselling writer who taught millions of readers to live authentically (Eat Pray Love) and creatively (Big Magic) shows how to break free.

In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya. They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: The two were in love. They were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.

What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?

All the Way to the River is a landmark memoir that will resonate with anyone who has ever been captive to love—or to any other passion, substance, or craving – and who yearns, at long last, for liberation.

A mesmerizing firsthand account of the warping of American reality over the past decade as Donald Trump has risen to dominance—from a participatory witness who got so far inside the distortion field that it swallowed her whole.

Olivia Nuzzi spent a third of her life observing those in power. She became a reporter in 2014, when the political landscape began to recon­figure itself around a singular personality whom she was uniquely primed to understand. Over the next ten years, she used her access and eye for detail to chronicle his campaigns, trials, and government in blockbuster feature stories that drove the national conversation and propelled her to the heights of her profession.

Then, in 2024, her personal life collided with the public interest in a scandal that cost Nuzzi her job and reputation. Amid a full-blown tabloid frenzy, Nuzzi went quiet, drove west, and spent the next year in self-imposed exile at the edge of the country, where she wrote this searing and astonishingly clear-eyed account of what she—and we—have experienced over the last decade.

Nuzzi walked through hell and she took notes. The result is a brilliant and bracing reckoning with recent history from one of our sharpest political observers. Beginning in the present in California, and then turning her gaze back east and back in time, she crafts a dazzling mosaic of the Trump era: her many behind-the-scenes encounters with Trump himself, from their first meeting in Trump Tower to a wealth of revelatory conversations about his Hollywood aspirations, his dreams, his fears about being assassinated, and more; the life she led uneasily that skidded to a halt; the rise of digital surveillance and the decline of privacy; the normalization of political violence; and the collision of polarization with the democratization of information to sow doubt about every aspect of our reality.

American Canto is also a powerful personal history. Nuzzi’s account of growing up in working-class New Jersey as the child of alcoholics in the shadow of New York City and 9/11 is raw and moving. Her mother was angry, beautiful, and unpredictable. Her father, a loving man who supported his family as a sanitation worker, removed debris from Ground Zero. They both died young. A version of Nuzzi did, too. She approached this “kind of death” with the critical distance of a reporter. When interrogating her own mistakes, Nuzzi confesses, “I had trained my whole life in the battlefield of crisis.”

Despite her profession, Olivia Nuzzi has never been interested in breaking news. American Canto is not a memoir, nor a tell-all, nor a book about the president. Instead, it is something more artful and more interest­ing—a character study of a nation undergoing radical transformation in real time. It seeks to reframe our under­standing of the history we are living through from the perspective of someone who observed it from within the kaleidoscope and now sees it clearly from the other side.

2023 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Named the BEST LGBTQ+ MEMOIR of 2022 by Book Riot
Named a New York Public Library Best Book of 2022
Weatherford Award finalist, nonfiction

“Commands your attention from the first page to the last word.” —Morgan Jerkins
“I’m glad this memoir exists . . . and I’m especially glad it’s so good.” —Vauhini Vara, New York Magazine

When Neema Avashia tells people where she’s from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving “There are Indian people in West Virginia?” A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles.

Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia’s identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more, Another Appalachia mixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.

Nicki Pappas experienced abuse as love from a young age. In As Familiar as Family, she explores and examines the ways in which she was groomed for unhealthy relationships and toxic religion.

This book chronicles her journey to find her voice — and a way out — which began once she understood how the spiritual abuse, power dynamics, narcissism, and emotional detachment in the church were as familiar as family.

By sharing her story, she hopes to empower others to leave anything toxic in their own lives.

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.

**A 2024 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST**

“Zachary Zane is one of the best sex writers working today.” —Dan Savage, New York Times bestselling author

Named a Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of the Year by Buzzfeed

A sex and relationship columnist bares it all in a series of essays—part memoir, part manifesto—that explore the author’s coming-of-age and coming out as a bisexual man and move toward embracing and celebrating sex unencumbered by shame.

As a boy, Zachary Zane sensed that all was not right when images of his therapist naked popped into his head. Without an explanation as to why, a deep sense of shame pervaded these thoughts. Though his therapist assured him a little imagination was nothing to be ashamed of, over the years, society told him otherwise.

Boyslut is a series of personal and tantalizing essays that articulate how our society still shames people for the sex that they have and the sexualities that they inhabit. Through the lens of his bisexuality and much self-described sluttiness, Zane breaks down exactly how this sexual shame negatively impacts the sex and relationships in our lives, and through personal experience, shares how we can unlearn the harmful, entrenched messages that society imparts to us.

From stories of drug-fueled threesomes and risqué Grindr hookups to insights on dealing with rejection and living with his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s wife, Boyslut is reassuring and often painfully funny—but is most potently a testimony that we can all learn to live healthier lives unburdened by stigma.

"The Trans Memoir We've Always Needed." —Autostraddle  

"This blistering memoir is the book I didn’t know I needed... I’m so grateful they had the courage to share their experience in such a transparent, authentic way." —One of BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated Books of 2022

• One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of the Month • One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Reads of 2022 • One of BookRiot's LGBTQ Books You Need to Read • 

When divorce moves young R/B Mertz away from rural Pennsylvania and their abusive father, Mertz's life is torn in two. Mertz's mom and new stepdad dive headfirst into conservative Catholic homeschooling, entrenching themselves in a world dominated by saints, prayers, and having as many babies as possible, just as Mertz is starting to realize they might be queer.

Mertz clings to Catholicism as a rebellion against their anti-Catholic bio-dad, and to movies and musicals as beacons of the world outside the conservative closet constructed by the homeschoolers—who might actually be more concerned with being conservative than with being good, while Mertz's bio-dad just wants them to be "normal." 

Trying to stave off the inevitable, Mertz enrolls in a conservative Catholic college in Ohio. Coming of age in the early aughts, they grapple with flirtations, sexual encounters, and confusing relationships with students and faculty, as they try to figure out how to live a life in a world hell-bent on making them choose between their community and their identity. 

At turns rebellious, charming, and self-effacing, Mertz struggles to navigate this oppressive environment, questioning whether or not there is a place for them inside or outside of the Catholic Church; whether they can be themselves on the left or the right; whether they can be "conservative" or "liberal;" or whether they can be at all. Ultimately, Burning Butch is the courageous story of a trans / non-binary butch on a quest to survive with their authenticity intact.

A striking literary memoir of genderfluidity, class, masculinity, and the American Southwest that captures the author's experience coming of age in a Tucson, Arizona, trailer park.

Newly arrived in the Sonoran Desert, eleven-year-old Zoë's world is one of giant beetles, thundering javelinas, and gnarled paloverde trees. With the family's move to Cactus Country RV Park, Zoë has been given a fresh start and a new, shorter haircut.

Although Zoë doesn't have the words to express it, he experiences life as a trans boy--and in Cactus Country, others begin to see him as a boy, too. Here, Zoë spends hot days chasing shade and freight trains with an ever-rotating pack of sunburned desert kids, and nights fending off his own questions about the body underneath his baggy clothes.

As Zoë enters adolescence, he must reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence endemic to the working class Cactus Country men he's grown close to, whose hard masculinity seems as embedded in the desert landscape as the cacti sprouting from parched earth. In response, Zoë adopts an androgynous style and new pronouns, but still cannot escape what it means to live in a gendered body, particularly when a fraught first love destabilizes their sense of self.

But beauty flowers in this desert, too. Zoë persists in searching for answers that can't be found in Cactus Country, dreaming of a day they might leave the park behind to embrace whatever awaits beyond.

Equal parts harsh and tender, Cactus Country is an invitation for readers to consider how we find our place in a world that insists on stark binaries, and a precisely rendered journey of self-determination that will resonate with anyone who's ever had to fight to be themself.

From state and federal courts to local and federal task forces, bribery, betrayal, and even CIA involvement, Capone Of Cannabis tells the story of how Ryan Richmond, Michigan's first licensed medical marijuana dispensary owner, was ultimately taken down not by bullets or battering rams, but by the IRS. When the guns, death threats, raids, and courtroom attacks did not work, they brought in the tax man. Richmond became the only American sent to prison under IRS Code 280E, better known as the pot tax.

Capone Of Cannabis is a true-crime memoir about what happened when the promise of marijuana legalization collided with the machinery of government power.

Ryan Richmond was there at the beginning of Michigan's medical marijuana industry, building in a space that was supposed to be legal, regulated, and driven by patient need. But the closer he got to success, the more he found himself trapped in a world of raids, asset forfeiture, police pressure, political corruption, and a federal tax code weaponized against cannabis entrepreneurs.

Part memoir and part exposé, Capone Of Cannabis tells the story of an industry that changed its language but not its enemies. What looked like progress from the outside often felt like a trap from the inside. Behind the headlines about reform and regulation was a darker truth: the war on marijuana never ended. It just got cleaner branding, better suits, and new methods.

At the center of the story is the human cost of that system. Richmond chronicles the rise of Michigan's early dispensary movement, the betrayals, the raids, the courtroom battles, the financial devastation, and the emotional toll of being targeted while trying to operate in good faith inside a broken and shifting legal framework. His story traces the line from street-level enforcement to paper-and-pen punishment to the US Supreme Court to federal prison, showing how the government is still winning the war on cannabis.

Unflinching, urgent, and deeply personal, Capone Of Cannabis is more than a cannabis story. It is a story about power, selective enforcement, race, money, and the American habit of changing the rules after people have already risked everything to play by them.

For readers interested in true crime, political corruption, criminal justice, and the real history of cannabis in America, Capone Of Cannabis pulls back the curtain on a system that never stopped punishing the people it claimed to tolerate.