Happy Pride, y’all! I hope you’re celebrating in all the ways that feel right to you. Of course, one of my favorite ways to celebrate is by reading queer stories, so here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the Southern LGBTQ+ books published in the first half of 2024. Even if you can’t fit them all into this month, add them to your TBR list anyway, because we recommend celebrating Pride all year long.
I Sing to Use the Waiting
by Zachary Pace
January 23, 2024
Two Dollar Radio: “With remarkable grace, candor, and a poet’s ear for prose, Zachary Pace recounts the women singers — from Cat Power to Madonna, Kim Gordon to Rihanna — who shaped them as a young person coming-of-age in rural New York, first discovering their own queer voice… Resonant and compelling, I Sing to Use the Waiting is a deeply personal rumination on how queer stories are abundant yet often suppressed, and how music may act as a comforting balm carrying us through difficult periods and decisions.”
Be Not Afraid of My Body
by Darius Stewart
February 6, 2024
Belt Publishing: “Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole. Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain.”
Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt
by Brontez Purnell
February 13, 2024
MCD: “The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement.”
The American Daughters
by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
February 27, 2024
One World: “Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are an inseparable duo. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days dreaming of a loving future and reminiscing on their family’s rebellious and storied history. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and direction-less, until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite — and help from these strong women — Ady learns how to choose herself. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.”
Feeding the Ghosts
by Rahul Mehta
March 5, 2024
University Press of Kentucky: “In 2017, writer and educator Rahul Mehta began a writing practice to find solace and beauty — in the natural world, in their family and friends, and in everyday simplicities — during a time of political tensions, environmental disasters, a global pandemic, and personal disappointment… The result of this exercise is a profoundly moving poetry collection that explores Mehta’s South Asian and Appalachian culture, their Queerness, their relationships with self and others, race, privilege, and a deep admiration of nature and the spiritual realm.”
Ariel Crashes a Train
by Olivia A. Cole
March 12, 2024
Labyrinth Road: “Ariel is afraid of her own mind. She already feels like she is too big, too queer, too rough to live up to her parents’ exacting expectations, or to fit into what the world expects of a ‘good girl.’ … Then a summer job at a carnival brings new friends into Ariel’s fractured world , and she finds herself questioning her desire to keep everyone out — of her head and her heart. But if they knew what she was really thinking, they would run in the other direction — right? Instead, with help and support, Ariel discovers a future where she can be at home in her mind and body, and for the first time learns there’s a name for what she struggles with — Obsessive Compulsive Disorder — and that she’s not broken, and not alone.”
A Small Apocolypse
by Laura Chow Reeve
March 15, 2024
TriQuarterly: “In her debut short-story collection A Small Apocalypse, Laura Chow Reeve examines cultural inheritance, hybridity, queerness, and the stickiness of home with an eye for both the uncanny and the realistic: human bodies become reptilian, queer ghosts haunt their friends, a young woman learns to pickle memories, and a theater floods during an apocalyptic movie marathon… Heavily steeped in the swampy, feral heat of Florida, these stories venture beyond the problems of constructing an identity to the frontier of characters living their truth in a world that doesn’t yet have a place for them.”
Rainbow Black
by Maggie Thrash
March 19, 2024
Harper Perennial: “Lacey Bond is a 13-year-old girl in New Hampshire growing up in the tranquility of her hippie parents’ rural daycare center. Then the Satanic Panic hits. It’s the summer of 1990 when Lacey ’s parents are handcuffed, flung into the county jail, and faced with a torrent of jaw-dropping accusations as part of a mass hysteria sweeping the nation. When a horrific murder brings Lacey to the breaking point, she makes a ruthless choice that will haunt her for decades.
As an adult, Lacey mimes a normal life as the law clerk of an illustrious judge. She has a beautiful girlfriend, a measure of security, and the world has mostly forgotten about her. But after a tiny misstep spirals into an uncontrolled legal disaster, the hysteria threatens to begin all over again.”
No Son of Mine
by Jonathan Corcoran
April 1, 2024
The University Press of Kentucky: “In No Son of Mine, Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost geographies: the trees, mountains, and streams that were once his birthright, as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son. A biography nestled inside a memoir, No Son of Mine is Corcoran’s story of alienation and his attempts to understand his mother’s choice to cut him out of her life. Through grief, anger, questioning, and growth, Corcoran explores the entwined yet separate histories and identities of his mother and himself.”
Deviant Hollers
Edited by Zane McNeill & Rebecca Scott
April 1, 2024
The University Press of Kentucky: “Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future uses the lens of queer ecologies to explore environmental destruction in Appalachia while mapping out alternative futures that follow from critical queer perspectives on the United States’ exploitation of the land. With essays by Lis Regula, Jessica Cory, Chet Pancake, Tijah Bumgarner, MJ Eckhouse, and other essential thinkers, this collection brings to light both emergent and long-standing marginalized perspectives that give renewed energy to the struggle for a sustainable future. A new and valuable contribution to the field of Appalachian studies, rural queer studies, Indigenous studies, and ethnographic studies of the United States, Deviant Hollers presents a much-needed objection to the status quo of academic work, as well as to the American exceptionalism and white supremacy pervading US politics and the broader geopolitical climate. By focusing on queer critiques and acknowledging the status of Appalachia as a settler colony, Deviant Hollers offers new possibilities for a reimagined way of life.”
A Good Happy Girl
by Marissa Higgins
April 2, 2024
Catapult: “Helen, a jittery attorney with a self-destructive streak, is secretly reeling from a disturbing crime of neglect that her parents recently committed… A Good Happy Girl is interested in worlds without men — and women who will do what they can to get what they want. In her exploration of twisted desires, queer domesticity, and the effects of incarceration on the family, Marissa Higgins offers empathy to characters who often don’t receive it, with unsettling results.”
Nonbinary Bird of Paradise
by Emilia Phillips
April 2, 2024
University of Akron Press: “Nonbinary Bird of Paradise shakes its tail feathers, reveling in a body that cannot be contained in gender binaries. Its opening sequence re-imagines the Judaeo-Christian Eve as a queer person who, instead of eating of the proverbial forbidden fruit, conjures a femme lover. This retelling, accompanied by other retellings of classical and biblical narratives, indicts the ways in which religion and myth have created and buttressed compulsory heterosexuality.”
Nopalito, Texas
by David Meischen
April 15, 2024
University of New Mexico Press: “In this stunning debut story collection, everyone’s got the blues but nobody is willing to sing it. Evelyn Smith, Candace Lambert, and Dorene Wahrmund chafe against rigid small-town expectations. Others in hardscrabble Nopalito find themselves fenced in — an aging gay liquor store owner estranged among his neighbors, a mother and son bound by mutual resentment, two neighboring farm boys attracted to each other. Their stories are driven by desperation, rarely spoken, that troubles the community’s inhabitants as it nudges them toward connection, toward moments of hope. Meischen draws these characters with a tenderness that belies the hardness of their lives.”
Deer Black Out
by Ulrich Jesse K. Baer
April 16, 2024
Red Hen Press: “Deer Black Out is a(n obsessional re) mediation of violence and trauma through the trans/coalescence of identities surfacing and resurfacing within a manuscript of serialized poetry, influenced by HD, Zukofsky, and Ronald Johnson. It’s sort of like a body, the movement of which you can only recognize emerging within a field of static. Just the outlines. A deer! In ramifying lines, this poetry creates a self-reciprocating dialogue with the very act of self-replication. The language exists as the prosthetic support that co-creates and conditions the Baerself’s emergence into the real.”
The Last Boyfriends Rules for Revenge
by Matthew Hubbard
April 30, 2024
Delacorte Press: “A queer coming-of-age about three teenage boys in small town Alabama who set out to get revenge on their ex-boyfriends and end up starting a student rebellion. Between ex-boyfriend drama and navigating viral TikTok fame, Ezra realizes this rebellion is about something more important than revenge. It’s a battle cry to fight back against outdated opinions and redefine what it means to be queer in small town Alabama.”
Shae
By Mesha Maren
May 21, 2024
Algonquin: “From ‘a highest-order storyteller of Southern noir’ (Electric Literature), a queer coming-of-age novel about addiction, belonging, and loving a place that doesn’t always love you back. When sixteen-year-old Shae meets Cam, who is new to their small town in West Virginia, she thinks she has found someone who is everything she has ever wanted in a companion. The two become fast friends, and then more. And when Shae ends up pregnant, Cam begins a different transition — trying on clothes that Shae can no longer fit into and using female pronouns. Shae tries to be fully supportive as Cam becomes the person she wants and needs to be. Shae is as much about these two young women as it is about the home they both love despite its limitations. Following the acclaimed Sugar Run and Perpetual West, this is Mesha Maren’s most intense and intimate novel yet.”
Pretty: A Memoir
By KB Brookins
May 28, 2024
Knopf: “Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency — whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as ‘other.’”
Our Bodies Electric
by Zackery Vernon
June 4, 2024
Fitzroy Books: “Tormented by his religious family and the broader conservative community of Pawley’ s Island, South Carolina, fourteen-year-old Josh struggles with the pressure to conform to their puritanical standards. As he embarks upon his high school years, Josh meets a supportive cast of eccentric small-town characters, falls in love with his classmate, becomes obsessed with David Bowie, and fumbles in his attempts to make his own thongs. But it’ s when his elderly neighbor gives him a copy of Walt Whitman’ s “ Song of Myself” that he begins to understand his own sexuality. Our Bodies Electric is a coming-of-age story that celebrates the exuberance of youth, the individual quest for sexual identity, and the joy of finding connections in the most unexpected of places.”
A Product of Genetics (and Day Drinking)
by Jess H. Gutierrez
June 18, 2024
Tiny Reparations Books: “This collection of comedic essays is a book perfect for a very imperfect generation. Millennials were the kids who wore slap bracelets and jeans so low rise they could see each other’s colons, and they are now adults wondering is everyone else as messed up as I am?
In her book, Jess shares relatable tales of a woman who feels like a dumpster fire even with a seemingly ideal set up with a fire-captain wife, three kids, and a mortgage. Highlights include roller derby catastrophes, a disastrous first night on the job at a lesbian bar, narrow escapes from wild animals, and fond memories of sending printed thirst trap photos via mail to the lover in Australia she met on the early internet. Readers will soon cheerfully discover that Jess’s voice is infectious, her stories are off-the-wall, and her references are deeply and delightfully Millennial.”
Hombrecito
Santiago Jose Sanchez
June 25, 2024
Riverhead Books: “n this groundbreaking novel, Santiago Jose Sanchez plunges us into the heart of one boy’s life. His mother takes him and his brother from Colombia to America, leaving their absent father behind but essentially disappearing herself once they get to Miami… Hombrecito — ‘little man’ — is a moving portrait of a young person between cultures, between different ideas of himself. From an extraordinary new talent, this is a story told with startling beauty and intensity, a story for anyone searching for home, searching for a way to love.”
Southern Review of Books 