Results for: book
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Leah Johnson Is the Toni Morrison of Queer YA, It’s Time We Get Real About That Fact
“I just want people to know that at the core of every book I write, I want to center black girls in their wholeness and show that you can be flawed. You can be scared. You can be beautiful.”
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What Is Queer Fiction? An Interview with Patrick Yumi Cottrell
The first time I encountered a book with queer characters must have been James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. At the time I remember feeling afraid of its intensity. Now it’s one of my most returned-to books along with Lydia Davis’ The End of the Story.
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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: December’s Prologue
Like so many others, I’ve been chirping about the end of 2020, as if the transition from one year to the next will somehow magically suture our open wounds.
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Queer Arabs Taking Up Space: An Interview With Zaina Arafat
Zaina Arafat’s You Exist Too Much is the bi Arab romance novel l didn’t know I needed. We chat about the book, first-gen traumas, sexual ambiguity and Arab parents.
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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: November’s Sister Love
It has felt hard to state how much I’ve been missing my family lately. But Audre Lorde and Pat Parker’s relationship is a testament to the life-affirming power of queer kinship. Their enduring love attests to the power and beauty of Black queer sisterhood.
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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: October’s Dead Is Behind Us
To be Black in this world is to be intimate with a kind of living death. It’s an intimacy no one craves, and yet Black people know better than most that Audre Lorde speaks truth to power when she says “we were never meant to survive.”
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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: August’s New Spelling of My Name
In my own myth, New York has been the cornerstone of what shaped me, finally allowing myself to be in my queerness. While the New York I inhabited and the one of Audre Lorde’s life looked radically different, Lorde’s relationships and the women she loves and lusts for each leave her fuller than before.
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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: September’s Afterimages
I am safe nowhere, the Black women in my family of origin and family of choice are safe nowhere. It’s a fact we’ve known but one that feels all the more threatening in the wake of continuing violent injustice for Black women.
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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: July Is a Black Unicorn
I’m still angry. Breonna Taylor’s murderers still walk free. Let’s be real, they’re probably running around without masks. Audre Lorde’s sense of restlessness and barely concealed fury are evident. But so, too, is her unwavering belief in our magic.
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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: June’s Uses of Anger
We are in the middle of a revolution. My Black woman’s anger is here to signal a necessary sea change. Understand that all of our freedoms are bound up in one another.
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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: April’s Arithmetics of Distance
This is dedicated to those who are just trying to make it through every day. It’s been gratifying on an almost cellular level to find that the queen mother Audre Lorde can so frequently speak to the times and places in which we find ourselves. Her final book of poetry, “The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance,” is no exception.
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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: May’s Burst of Light
“I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes — everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!”
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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: March’s Poetry Is Not a Luxury
One of the biggest lessons of Audre Lorde’s work is the strength of coalitional politics. I need a movement that can hold my anger. I need a movement that can hold my contradictions. I shouldn’t have to qualify my rage when speaking out about injustice.
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Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: February’s Revolutionary Hope
I’m pairing Audre Lorde’s 1984 conversation with James Baldwin and arguably her best-known speech, “The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in hopes of exploring how our power and freedom lie in embracing our differences as the source of our strength.
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“I Am the Terrorist I Must Disarm”: An Interview with Staceyann Chin
I was in high school when I first saw Staceyann Chin perform, barefoot and incensed. She was fearless in her rage, her sexuality, her eloquence. Now, I feel the same reading her as I felt watching all those years ago — as if I’m being granted permission.
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Toni Morrison Has Died at 88; When I Was 27, She Saved My Life
Maybe that’s why black women love Toni Morrison. She laid bare the kind of secrets that we barely even whispered to each other, the shames that we buried underneath our quick tongues and sisterhood hugs and fashion slays. She wrote for us, and for that she is ours.
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Read A F*cking Book Club: A Conversation With Gabby Rivera About “Juliet Takes A Breath”
We’re talking to Gabby Rivera about her debut novel “Juliet Takes a Breath”! We talk about subtleties in Latinx media representation, queer community, forgiveness and, of course, Lil’ Melvin.
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“Small Beauty” is a Big Deal for Queer Lit and Trans Girls: An Interview With Author Jia Qing Wilson-Yang
Wilson-Yang deftly weaves and unweaves the threads of narrative tropes that have come to dominate the telling of the stories of trans women, lesbians, migrants, and Chinese North Americans.
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The Speakeasy Book Club Is Reading “Sister Outsider” And You Should Too!
The Speakeasy is starting a book club to read QTPOC-relevant books, and you’re all invited to join.
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Hey, Let’s All Read Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa!
Come join the Speakeasy Book Club as we quest for literary enlightenment and embiggen our collective minds.