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Lambda Literary Award winner for Best LBTQ+ Anthology

More than forty trans writers and artists have joined forces to explore the deeper meanings of the Fast & Furious franchise (and also gender). There's really no way to know why this exists, but it does, and you can own it! Suitable for F&F fans and newcomers alike.

Includes:
- A new short story by Manhunt author Gretchen Felker-Martin
- A demolition derby driver’s perspective on 2 Fast 2 Furious’s derby scene
- An essay contemplating the queer symbolism of Cipher’s bowl cut
- The scoop on the franchise’s only canonically nonbinary character - Instructions for an F&F-themed tabletop role-playing game - A contemplation of which Taylor Swift album represents each F&F character

Plus: Bingo cards! Comics! Haiku! And, of course, hot gay erotica…

2 Trans 2 Furious is edited by Tuck Woodstock and Niko Stratis, with cover art by Mattie Lubchansky and zine design by Shay Mirk.

By Ed Madden, 2023, paperback

Ed Madden's newest collection explores growing up queer in the fundamentalist South.

Selected by Timothy Liu for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Madden's mastery of the American lyric combines intellect, heart, and courage as he explores growing up queer in the rural fundamentalist South. The poems anatomize a society of shaming and shunning under the guise of love, fighting free to the theme of finding where we belong. The poems work deep into the linguistic textures of his subjects, from queer love to the loss of a parent. The figure of the pooka (or puca) haunts the pages, embodying both good and bad luck, sorrow and hope.

By: Steven Reigns (Author), 2021, Paperback

The hidden history of a vulnerable gay man whose life and death were turned into tabloid fodder.

In the early 1990s, eight people living in a small conservative Florida town alleged that Dr. David Acer, their dentist, infected them with HIV. David's gayness, along with his sickly appearance from his own AIDS-related illness, made him the perfect scapegoat and victim of mob mentality. In these early years of the AIDS epidemic, when transmission was little understood, and homophobia rampant, people like David were villainized. Accuser Kimberly Bergalis landed a People magazine cover story, while others went on talk shows and made front page news.

With a poet's eulogistic and psychological intensity, Steven Reigns recovers the life and death of this man who also stands in for so many lives destroyed not only by HIV, but a diseased society that used stigma against the most vulnerable. It's impossible not to make connections between this story and how the twenty-first century pandemic has also been defined by medical misinformation and cultural bias.

Inspired by years of investigative research into the lives of David and those who denounced him, Reigns has stitched together a hauntingly poetic narrative that retraces an American history, questioning the fervor of his accusers, and recuperating a gay life previously shrouded in secrecy and shame.

"Much too long, suffering has been part of our collective queer legacy. We weather the storm of insult to character and seemingly irreconcilable injustice in tandem with the hope that the arc of time will bend towards justice; our time is now. A Quilt for David is a posthumous journal of vindication."—Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

"A stunning homage to people with AIDS."—Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

"I found this an incredibly moving book. Reigns deals in hard truths, revisioning one man's life and death, and our collective queer history."—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

"A Quilt for David is amazing and so powerful, filled with anger and frustration . . . It's an unforgettable book."—Marie Cloutier, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY

"Told in short, occasionally haiku-like entries, Reigns has done what literature should: put the reader into the mind, the suffering, of another human being."—Andrew Holleran, author of Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited

"Steven Reigns lifts David Acer thirty years after his death to show the naked cost of violent, unexamined public opinion around the catastrophe of AIDS. This poetry masterfully documents the tangle of hatred and lies haunting a generation of survivors. I am often grateful for what poems give to me, most especially the ones in this book."—CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration

"This writing is energetic, alive, and uncensored. Through poetry and prose we glean a deep understanding of a life misunderstood and mischaracterized. Reigns goes to the mat to find out what really happened, and with his expert pacing we're right there with him."—Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones

"One of the most important roles a poet can assume is that of emotional historian. Reigns certainly understands that notion in this necessary and genre-bending book."—Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country

By Ed Madden, 2023, paperback

A Story of the City: Poems Occasional and Otherwise

When Ed Madden was named poet laureate for the City of Columbia, South Carolina, in 2015, he became the first city laureate in the state of South Carolina. During his two terms as city laureate, Madden documented the life and history of the city. He engaged the community by making poetry a public art, posting poems on city buses, sidewalks, movie screens, coffee sleeves, restaurant menus, and faux parking tickets distributed in downtown Columbia one bright and sunny April Fool's Day. While these poems are about a specific city, they ring true for almost any Southern city-maybe any city in America-with its ceremonial occasions and its natural disasters, its misleading public monuments and its protest marches, and its inevitably complex histories. His post officially began with a commemoration of the historic burning of Columbia during the American Civil War and ended with the selection of a new city flag. This collection spans either years of ceremony and controversy, an eclipse and a pandemic, welcomes and elegies, history and hope.

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.

By: Roxane Gay (Author), 2014, Paperback

“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.”  — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

A New York Times Bestseller

Best Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe • Newsweek • Time Out New York • Oprah.com • Miami Herald • Book Riot • Buzz Feed • Globe and Mail (Toronto) • The Root • Shelf Awareness

A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched cultural observers of her generation

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.

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, coming from one of our most interesting and important cultural critics.

By: Cassie Premo Steele (Author), 2017, Paperback

On their honeymoon, two women journey to Oregon and encounter the deeper, painful springs of the state's history while learning from the land and water how to live, and love, in new ways. Oregon is thought to have been a Native American word for "beautiful waters." In this volume of poetry with the same name, Beautiful Waters, the landscapes of nation and state are seen through the eyes of a woman in love. On her honeymoon in Oregon with her new wife, the poet takes readers with her on a journey through the element of water as a representation of our heart's deepest natural powers: vulnerability, intimacy, and renewal. The seven poems with titles like "Clouds," "Falls," and "Springs," move beneath the obvious, personal streams into the deeper, underground histories of Westward Expansion, Native American removal, industrialization and commercialization, and environmental destruction. And yet throughout, there are rainbows, blends of color and light and water, leading us to hope for something greater. Beautiful Waters, in the end, shows what might spring from facing these histories: an understanding of our shared connection to the land with its promise of healing our wounds as we learn to live, and love, in new ways.

Tayler Simon is an activist and organizer who has been working in different social movements since she was 18. After obtaining her Master's in Social Work and working within the violence prevention and outreach world for five years, she decided to take those skills outside of institutions and back to organic community.

Reflecting on the roles of power, joy, despair, anger, and hope within the liberation movement, Black Madonna invites readers into an experience that sparks action from feelings-even in such trying times. Tayler's poems inspire readers to find hope when it feels impossible. This is an urgent, heartfelt, and eclectic collection of poetry. Haunting and beautiful, it will leave us curious about our role in community.

By: Brittany Black Rose Capri (Author), Danez Smith (Foreword), 2018, Paperback

Black Queer Hoe is a refreshing, unapologetic intervention into ongoing conversations about the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation.

Women’s sexuality is often used as a weapon against them. In this powerful debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries.

Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a Chicago performance poet and playwright. Currently she is an alumna turned Teaching Artist Fellow at Young Chicago Authors. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, Button Poetry, Seven Scribes, and many other outlets, and anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. She is a contributor to Black Nerd Problems, a Pink Door Retreat Fellow, and a 2015 Rona Jaffe Writers Award Recipient.

By: nat räum (Author), 2024, Paperback

camera indomita is a poetry chapbook exploring queerness, borderline personality disorder, alcoholism, and post-traumatic stress disorder through the framework of photography and coming of age in an art school environment. The ninth chapbook and eleventh book of poetry by photographer, artist, and writer nat raum, these poems further the author’s long-term poetic reckonings with recklessness and investigations of intimacy from a trauma-informed perspective. Through forms experimental and familiar, this book excises memories with surgical precision, shedding a flickering strobe on life behind (and in front of) the lens.

By Willie Lee Kinard III

By: Danez Smith (Author), 2017, Paperback

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection

“[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”―The New Yorker

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality―the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood―and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “Some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America―“Dear White America”―where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

In the highly-anticipated follow-up to Putting Out: Essays on Otherness, Samantha Mann turns her keen insight to Dyke Delusions: Essays & Observations. A mix of personal history and pop culture, Dyke Delusions is a mix of body politics, motherhood, and feminine sexuality that showcases some of Samantha Mann's published work and brand new essays. Told in her signature humor and pitch-perfect observations, Dyke Delusions is a collection of desire, yearning, and a search for more. This collection is an important reminder that our journeys deserve to be acknowledged even as the endpoint is ever-changing.

By: Kai Chen Thom, 2023, Paperback

A national bestseller in Canada, hailed by The New York Times as an “intimate expression of self-acceptance and forgiveness, tenderly written to fellow trans women and others.”

“Required reading.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 bestselling author of Untamed

A THEM AND AUTOSTRADDLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD

What happens when we imagine loving the people—and the parts of ourselves—that we do not believe are worthy of love?

Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, psychotherapist, conflict mediator, and spiritual healer, she’s always pursued the same deeply personal mission: to embrace the revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how hateful or horrible, is intrinsically sacred.

But then Kai Cheng found herself in a crisis of faith, overwhelmed by the viciousness with which people treated one another, and barely clinging to the values and ideals she’d built her life around: justice, hope, love, and healing. Rather than succumb to despair and cynicism, she gathered all her rage and grief and took one last leap of faith: she wrote. Whether prayers or spells or poems—and whether there’s a difference—she wrote to affirm the outcasts and runaways she calls her kin. She wrote to flawed but nonetheless lovable men, to people with good intentions who harm their own, to racists and transphobes seemingly beyond saving. What emerged was a blueprint for falling back in love with being human.

By: Pamela Sneed (Author), 2020, Paperback

Funeral Diva is the Winner of the Lambda Award for Lesbian Poetry!

A poetic memoir about coming-of-age in the AIDS era, and its effects on life and art.

"Sneed is an acclaimed reader of her own poetry, and the book has the feeling of live performance. . . . Its strength is in its abundance, its desire for language to stir body as well as mind."―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review

"She is a writer for the future, in that she defies genre."―Hilton Als

"This notable achievement, traveling from youth to adulthood, is a harrowing account of how Sneed transforms violence and pain into an artist's life."―Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric

"There's an eerie sense of timeliness to this book, which features prose and poetry by the writer and teacher Pamela Sneed and is largely ― though not entirely ― about mourning Black gay men killed too soon by a deadly virus."―Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed

"OH MY GOODNESS, it was amazing. I was in tears by the end. What starts off as beautiful memoir evolves into incredibly moving poetry, painful and sweet and lovely."―Marie Cloutier, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY

"Balancing and mixing, with rhyme and reason, love and anger, good and bad, memory and the created present, all to tell the story of a life, a memoir unrestrained, devoid of artificial forms. Honest. Free."―Anjanette Delgado, New York Journal of Books

In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on Black Queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed’s poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears―like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde―whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape.

Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights, Funeral Diva confronts today's most pressing issues with acerbic wit and audacity. The collection closes with Sneed's reflections on the two pandemics of her time, AIDS and COVID-19, and the disproportionate impact of each on African American communities.

"Riveting, personal, open-hearted, risky and wise."―Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse

" . . . a tour de force about the collision between a coalescing 1980s 'Black lesbian and gay literary and poetic movement' in New York and the onslaught of AIDS."―Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Pamela Sneed's Funeral Diva is deft, defiant, and devastating."―Tommy Pico, author of Feed

"Funeral Diva is urgent and necessary reading to live by. This is writing at its finest. Keep this book close to your heart and soul."―Karen Finley, author of Shock Treatment

"Reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s Zami, Pamela Sneed’s memoir is, in itself, a healing balm, affirming in its truths and honesty. I cannot remember ever reading a book that illustrates the impact of the AIDS epidemic on our community more poignantly than Funeral Diva."―Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy

"Pamela Sneed takes enormous risks in this book. She tells the truth with fierce concentration and an abiding sense of purpose.”―Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina