Memoir & Biography

By: K.G. Strayer (Author), 2024, Paperback

Stellar Nursery follows trans/nonbinary poet and artist K.G. Strayer's struggle for bodily autonomy. From abortion to top surgery, colliding galaxies to cellular division, Strayer's lyric prose explores what it means to move through the modern world in a contentious body.

The state-mandated "counseling" packet Strayer receives a week before their abortion in 2014 describes the embryo in relation to coins-the height of a nickel, the diameter of a dime. Meant to make them picture holding it in their hands. Instead, Strayer's imagination conjures a whole galaxy in its place-a star being born.

Years later in 2022, Roe V. Wade is overturned. The decision is a catalyst that sets in motion explosive consequences in Strayer's personal life, and their access to life-saving top surgery hangs in the balance.

Strayer's memoir is a heartfelt account of the layered ways our struggles against fascism converge in the context of lived experience.

To meet the world fully embodied-is that a choice we can all make equally?

By: Caitlin Cass (Author), 2024, Hardback

New Yorker contributing cartoonist Caitlin Cass traces the fight for suffrage in the U.S. from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This intersectional history of women and voting rights chronicles the suffrage movement’s triumphs, setbacks, and problematic aspects.

Best Art Books of 2024, Hyperallergic

“She put in her work, but there’s so much left to do.” Begun in the Antebellum era, the song of suffrage was a rallying cry across the nation that would persist over a century. Capturing the spirit of this refrain, New Yorker contributing cartoonist Caitlin Cass pens a sweeping history of women’s suffrage in the U.S. ― a kaleidoscopic story akin to a triumphant and mournful protest song that spans decades and echoes into the present.

In Suffrage Song, Cass takes a critical, intersectional approach to the movement’s history ― celebrating the pivotal, hard-fought battles for voting rights while also laying bare the racist compromises suffrage leaders made along the way. She explores the multigenerational arc of the movement, humanizing key historical figures from the early days of the suffrage fight (Susan B. Anthony, Frances Watkins Harper), to the dawn of the “New Women” (Alice Paul, Mary Church Terrell), to the Civil Rights era (Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker). Additionally, this book sheds light on less chronicled figures such as Zitkala-Ša and Mabel Ping Hua-Lee, whose stories reveal the complex racial dynamics that haunt this history.

The interiors include 4 foldouts, most notably a 4-page map detailing where women could vote in the US in 1919, leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Impeccably researched and rendered in an engaging and accessible comics style, Suffrage Song is sure to spark discussion on the vital issue of voting rights that continues to resonate today.

Full-color illustrations throughout

By: Eric Rosswood (Author), 2024, Paperback (LGBT Book of History, Queer Historic Icons)

Discover how gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people have changed the world into the one we know and love in this riveting history book.

#1 New Release in Teen & Young Adult LGBTQ+ Issues

Pride across the ages. The LGBTQ+ community has made countless positive impacts throughout history as scientists, world leaders, athletes, and entrepreneurs, and each one of them deserves to be celebrated in The Book of Awesome Queer Heroes. Going into the history and achievements of famous queer icons, this LGBTQ+ book is a love letter to those who have brought love, positivity, and advancement into our society. Let author and activist Eric Rosswood and Kathleen Archambeau guide your discovery of amazing facts about each historical figure and how their lives have shaped ours in more ways than one.

How they are still inspiring us today. The Book of Awesome Queer Heroesdoesn’t just cover what so many LGBTQ+ people have accomplished; it also shares how we can achieve our dreams by learning from their persistence. Learn about activists such as Marsha P. Johnson, X González, Sylvia Rivera and many more in their fight for progressive change against discrimination.

Meet heroes and world-changers you may have heard of, with biographies about:

•      Star athletes such as Esera Tuaolo and Billie Jean King
•      Entertainers like Sir Elton John, Margaret Cho, Daniela Vega, and RuPaul
•      Government and military officials such as Eric Fanning and Leo Varadkar
•      Trailblazers in science and technology including, Alan Turing and Lynn Conway
•      Other historic icons like Oscar Wilde and Bayard Rustin

If you enjoy LGBTQ+ books and memoirs such as Hollywood Pride, The House of Hidden Meaning, or Karma, then you’ll love The Book of Awesome Queer Heroes.

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.

A Penguin Classic

First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.

By Les Payne and Tamara Payne, 2021, Paperback

An epic, award-winning biography of Malcolm X that draws on hundreds of hours of personal interviews and rewrites much of the known narrative.

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to create an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction. The result is this historic, National Book Award–winning biography, which interweaves previously unknown details of Malcolm X’s life―from harrowing Depression-era vignettes to a moment-by-moment retelling of the 1965 assassination―into an extraordinary account that contextualizes Malcolm X’s life against the wider currents of American history. Bookended by essays from Tamara Payne, Payne’s daughter and primary researcher, who heroically completed the biography after her father’s death in 2018, The Dead Are Arising affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle. 16 pages of illustrations

What if you discovered that the whole concept of a gender binary is an illusion?

While many people identify as men or women, that is not all there is. The idea that all humans fall into one of two gender categories is largely a construct created by those who benefit from that belief. The reality is that gender is naturally diverse, falling inside and outside of those boxes, and 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 identities and physical bodies are as diverse as the human experience. Get ready to shatter those preconceived notions of nothing but a gender binary and dive deep into expressions of gender―both past and present―that reveal the infinite variety and beauty of everyone’s gender.

A brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back

“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.

In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.

Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “nation” and “history.” Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.

By: RuPaul (Author), 2024, Hardback

***An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!***

From international drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul, comes his most revealing and personal work to date--a deeply intimate memoir of discovery, found family, and self-acceptance. The House of Hidden Meanings is a self-portrait of the legendary icon on the road to global fame and changing the way the world thinks about drag.

Central to RuPaul’s success has been his chameleonic adaptability. From drag icon to powerhouse producer of one of the world’s largest television franchises, RuPaul’s ever-shifting nature has always been part of his brand as both supermodel and supermogul. Yet that adaptability has made him enigmatic to the public. In this memoir, his most intimate and detailed book yet, RuPaul makes himself truly known.

In The House of Hidden Meanings, RuPaul strips away all artifice and recounts the story of his life with breathtaking clarity and tenderness, bringing his signature wisdom and wit to his own biography. From his early years growing up as a queer Black kid in San Diego navigating complex relationships with his absent father and temperamental mother, to forging an identity in the punk and drag scenes of Atlanta and New York, to finding enduring love with his husband Georges LeBar and self-acceptance in sobriety, RuPaul excavates his own biography life-story, uncovering new truths and insights in his personal history.

Here in RuPaul’s singular and extraordinary story is a manual for living—a personal philosophy that testifies to the value of chosen family, the importance of harnessing what makes you different, and the transformational power of facing yourself fearlessly.

A profound introspection of his life, relationships, and identity, The House of Hidden Meanings is a self-portrait of the legendary icon on the road to global fame and changing the way the world thinks about drag. “I've always loved to view the world with analytical eyes, examining what lies beneath the surface. Here, the focus is on my own life—as RuPaul Andre Charles,” says RuPaul.

If we’re all born naked and the rest is drag, then this is RuPaul totally out of drag. This is RuPaul stripped bare. 

By: Ta-Nehisi Coates (Author), 2024, Hardcover

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.

“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”—Associated Press

“Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely.”—Booklist (starred review)

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,”but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground. 

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

By:  Adam Eli (Author), Ashley Lukashevsky (Illustrator), 2020, Paperback, Pocket Change Collective

Pocket Change Collective is a series of small books with big ideas from today's leading activists and artists. In this installment, The New Queer Conscience, Voices4 Founder and LGBTQIA+ activist Adam Eli offers a candid and compassionate introduction to queer responsibility. Eli calls on his Jewish faith to underline how kindness and support within the queer community can lead to a stronger global consciousness. More importantly, he reassures us that we're not alone. In fact, we never were. Because if you mess with one queer, you mess with us all.

By: Jack Fairweather (Author), 2025, Hardback

From the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of The Volunteer, the powerful true story of a Jewish lawyer who returned to Germany after World War II to prosecute war crimes, only to find himself pitted against a nation determined to bury the past.

At the end of the Nuremberg trial in 1946, some of the greatest war criminals in history were sentenced to death, but hundreds of thousands of Nazi murderers and collaborators remained at large. The Allies were ready to overlook their pasts as the Cold War began, and the horrors of the Holocaust were in danger of being forgotten.

In The Prosecutor, Jack Fairweather brings to life the remarkable story of Fritz Bauer, a gay, Jewish judge from Stuttgart who survived the Nazis and made it his mission to force his countrymen to confront their complicity in the genocide. In this deeply researched book, Fairweather draws on unpublished family papers, newly declassified German records, and exclusive interviews to immerse readers in the shadowy, unfamiliar world of postwar West Germany where those who implemented genocide run the country, the CIA is funding Hitler’s former spy-ring in the east, and Nazi-era anti-gay laws are strictly enforced. But once Bauer landed on the trail of Adolf Eichmann, he wouldn’t be intimidated. His journey took him deep into the dark heart of West Germany, where his fight for justice would set him against his own government and a network of former Nazis and spies bent on silencing him.

In a time when the history of the Holocaust is taken for granted, The Prosecutor reveals the courtroom battles that were fought to establish its legacy and the personal cost of speaking out. The result is a searing portrait of a nation emerging from the ruins of fascism and one man’s courage in forcing his people––and the world––to face the truth.

[Skyhorse Publishing] by Rebecca Gibian: Hardcover; 240 pages / English

Understanding and applying the wisdom of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg! Given her incredible tenure as a Supreme Court justice as well as her monumental impact on the modern women’s rights movement, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become one of the most prominent political leaders of today. To complement her judicial significance, she has also become one of the most culturally popular political figures in US history. Not only has her workout routine gone viral (and been detailed in a book by her trainer), but RBG’s story has been featured in multiple critically acclaimed films. Organized into three parts and then broken down into more specific chapters within each part, The RBG Way offers wisdom from Justice Ginsburg, based on comments she has made on particular topics of importance. Insight is offered on subjects such as women’s rights, creating lasting partnerships, overcoming hardship, how to be brave, and how to create lasting change. Rebecca Gibian offers

By: Darrin Bell (Author), 2023, Hardcover

Winner of the NAACP Image Award in Outstanding Graphic Novels
Winner of an Alex Award from the American Library Association
Winner of the Libby Award for Best Comic/Graphic Novel of the Year
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Nonfiction
Nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Graphic Memoir
Nominated for an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel
Named The Year's Best Graphic Novel by Publishers Weekly
Named one of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Best Books of 2023
Named one of NPR's Books We Love
Named one of Kirkus' Best 2023 Books
Named one of the Washington Post's 10 best graphic novels of 2023
One of TIME Magazine's Must-Read Books of the Year
Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction 2024
Booklist Editors' Choice: Graphic Novels, 2023
New York Public Library's Best New Comics of 2023 Top Ten Pick
Chicago Public Library's Best Books of 2023 Top Ten Pick
Named one of School Library Journal's Best Graphic Novels of 2023
Named one of The Guardian's Best Graphic Novels of 2023

Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn’t have a realistic water gun. She said she feared for his safety, that police tend to think of little Black boys as older and less innocent than they really are.

Through evocative illustrations and sharp humor, Bell examines how The Talk shaped intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood. While coming of age in Los Angeles―and finding a voice through cartooning―Bell becomes painfully aware of being regarded as dangerous by white teachers, neighbors, and police officers and thus of his mortality. Drawing attention to the brutal murders of African Americans and showcasing revealing insights and cartoons along the way, he brings us up to the moment of reckoning when people took to the streets protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And now Bell must decide whether he and his own six-year-old son are ready to have The Talk.

By:Courtney Cook (Author), 2021, Paperback, Graphic Novel

Finalist for the 2022 Lammy Award for Bisexual & the 2022 Heartland Booksellers Award

A Book Riot Best Book of the Year

“Audaciously human and raw. The Way She Feels is a rainbow during the rain.” ―Mara Altman

A witty and one-of-a-kind debut graphic memoir detailing and drawing the life of a girl with borderline personality disorder finding her way―and herself―one day at a time.

What does it feel like to fall in love too hard and too fast, to hate yourself in equal and opposite measure? To live in such fear of rejection that you drive friends and lovers away? Welcome to my world. I’m Courtney, and I have borderline personality disorder (BPD), along with over four million other people in the United States. Though I’ve shown every classic symptom of the disorder since childhood, I wasn’t properly diagnosed until nearly a decade later, because the prevailing theory is that most people simply “grow out of it.” Not me.

In my illustrated memoir, The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces, I share what it’s been like to live and love with this disorder. Not just the hospitalizations, treatments, and residential therapy, but the moments I found comfort in cereal, the color pink, or mini corndogs; the days I couldn’t style my hair because I thought the blow-dryer was going to hurt me; the peace I found when someone I love held me. This is a book about vulnerability, honesty, acceptance, and how to speak openly―not only with doctors, co-patients, friends, family, or partners, but also with ourselves.

By Sarah McBride, 2019, Paperback

“A brave, powerful memoir” (People) that will change the way we look at identity and equality in this country, from the activist elected as the first openly transgender member of Congress in U.S. history

“The energy and vigor Sarah has brought to the fight for equality is ever present in this book.”—Vice President Kamala Harris

“If you’re living your own internal struggle, this book can help you find a way to live authentically, fully, and freely. . . . Let it show that we are all created equal and entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.”—President Joe Biden, from the foreword

Before she became the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention in 2016 at the age of twenty-six, Sarah McBride struggled with the decision to come out—not just to her family but to the students of American University, where she was serving as student body president. She’d known she was a girl from her earliest memories, but it wasn’t until the Facebook post announcing her truth went viral that she realized just how much impact her story could have on the country.

Four years later, McBride was one of the nation’s most prominent transgender activists, walking the halls of the White House, advocating inclusive legislation, and addressing the country in the midst of a heated presidential election. She had also found her first love and future husband, Andy, a trans man and fellow activist, who complemented her in every way . . . until cancer tragically intervened.

Informative, heartbreaking, and profoundly empowering, Tomorrow Will Be Different is McBride’s story of love and loss and a powerful entry point into the LGBTQ community’s battle for equal rights and what it means to be openly transgender. From issues like bathroom access to health care to gender in America, McBride weaves the important political and cultural milestones into a personal journey that will open hearts and change minds.

As McBride urges: “We must never be a country that says there’s only one way to love, only one way to look, and only one way to live.”

The fight for equality and freedom has only just begun.