Pride month is coming to a close, and I hope you’ve all read at least one queer story as part of your celebration this year. If not, there are still a few more hours of June left! But of course, we recommend celebrating the LGBTQ+ community’s stories all year long, so here’s a roundup of books released over the last year for you to add to your shelves anytime.
Diary of a Misfit
By Casey Parks
August 30, 2022
Knopf: “As Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger’s past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life.”
In the Hands of the River
By Lucien Darjeun Meadows
September 13, 2022
Hub City: “With delicate precision, In the Hands of the River subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia. This debut collection weaves ancestral and personal threads of trauma, reclamation, and survival into a multi-generational and multi-species tapestry that reaches from the distant stars visible in an Appalachian holler to the curl of a clover stem and the touch of the beloved, here and now.”
Black Swim
By Nicholas Goodly
September 13, 2022
Copper Canyon: “This stunning debut collection is at once ‘forged from the hurt parts of the ground,’ and ‘proof of a miracle,’ spinning ache and sweat and sweetness into a new model of feeling through language. Black people, queer/trans/nonbinary people, flamboyant people, lonely people, gaudy people, kind people, witches, artists, and angry people will meet themselves and each other in these pages.”
Engine Running
By Cade Mason
December 5, 2022
Ohio State University Press: “Lush and innovative, these essays contemplate childhood memories and family secrets, religion and queerness in the rural South, and the ways rituals and contours of manhood are passed through generations. Most of all, we feel with Mason what it is to grapple with and love a place even as you yearn to leave.”
We Deserve Monuments
By Jas Hammonds
November 29, 2022
Roaring Book Press: “As the three girls grow closer — Avery and Simone’s friendship blossoming into romance — the sharp-edged opinions of their small Southern town begin to hint at something insidious underneath. The racist history of Bardell, Georgia is rooted in Avery’s family in ways she can’t even imagine. With Mama Letty’s health dwindling every day, Avery must decide if digging for the truth is worth toppling the delicate relationships she’s built in Bardell — or if some things are better left buried.”
Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
By K. Iver
January 10, 2023
Milkweed: “Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco sees us through a particular kind of grief — one so relentless, it’s precious. It presses us, also, to continue advocating for a world in which queer love fantasies become reality and queer love poems ‘swaddle the impossible / contours of joy.'”
Phantom Advances
By Mary Lynn Reed
January 26, 2023
Split/Lip Press: “In Mary Lynn Reed’s debut short story collection, Phantom Advances, young queer women travel America’s back roads, roaming through the South, Midwest, New York, and California, while questions of gender and identity ride shotgun. Peering through bug-stained windshields and the viewfinders of old film cameras, these wanderers find love, heartbreak, and little pieces of themselves wherever the road takes them.”
God Themselves
By Jae Nichelle
March 14, 2023
Andrews McKeel: “Rising star and spoken word poet Jae Nichelle debuts her luminous thoughts in God Themselves, a new collection of stirring poetry. Nichelle taps into her experiences of growing up in the South as a queer Black woman to courageously confront the effects of a forced religion and the inherent dangers of living life in a female body.”
Mare’s Nest
By Holly Mitchell
May 23, 2023
Sarabande: “From Kentucky native and Brooklyn-based poet Holly Mitchell, Mare’s Nest troubles the meaning of a racehorse, in particular the broodmare and the foals she carries. Reaching from the photographic experiment of Muybridge’s ‘The Horse in Motion’ to Patti Smith’s album Horses, Mitchell touches upon history, dreams, Southern family stories, and queer adolescence in the early aughts.”
Dreaming Home
By Lucian Childs
June 6, 2023
Biblioasis: “A queer coming-of-age, and coming-to-terms, and a poignant exploration of all the ways we search for home, Dreaming Home is the unforgettable story of the fragmenting of an American family.”
Tar Hollow Trans
By Stacy Jane Grover
June 20, 2023
University Press of Kentucky: “Tar Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.”
Hated for the Gods
By Sean Patrick Mulroy
June 24, 2023
Button Poetry: “Gorgeously rendered and skillfully constructed both to educate and inspire, Sean Patrick Mulroy’s poetry weaves together stories from his coming of age in the American South of the 1990s with the broader history of gay men in America. The result is a politically radical text that will leave you shocked with all you didn’t know about the history of queer people, and surprised by what you already knew but never could articulate.”
Southern Review of Books 
In the Hands of a River sounds so good!
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