Sparks fly in this second chance m/m rom com when an unlucky-in-love event planner realizes the man-of-honor at the high profile wedding he's planning is the same man who broke his heart.

They say you never forget your first kiss. But Jordan Carter wishes he could forget the one he shared with Jamie Peters as teens. And the one they almost shared again last year before Jamie made it clear he wasn’t the “right” man for Jordan to be with while he’s figuring himself out.

Now, Jordan’s fully focused on his career at 24 Carter Gold, his family’s event planning company, and ready to move on - until his boss assigns him to plan a new client’s high-profile wedding. The bride’s man-of-honor? None other than Jamie.

As things ramp up the closer they get to the wedding, so does Jordan’s relationship with Jamie, with sarcastic asides turning into steamy hook-ups. But can Jordan afford to pursue Jamie if he’s still unsure who he is? Or is knowing who he loves enough? Venue shopping, cake-tastings, and dress fittings with the man he can’t forget just might change the man Jordan Carter is meant to become.

Last First Kiss by Julian Winters is a second chance romance about finding yourself–and the love of your life.

After storming the scene with Stereo(TYPE), the PEN America Award–winning poet makes his highly anticipated return—with a virtuosic sophomore collection that plunges the reader into the tenebrous realm between dreams and reality and firmly establishes him as an essential voice in American poetry.

“I’m coming to you live,” Jonah Mixon-Webster announces early on in Promise/Threat, “from the corner of Shit Blvd. and Out o’ Luck St. / with my monkey paws.” So begins a three-part journey of a troubled rebirth, one that ushers the reader through all the torment of a Dantean comedy as it climbs unsteadily from darkness to light, navigating an internalized landscape that evokes the Flint, Michigan, of the poet’s youth.

In the long central sequence, “Territory,” Mixon-Webster sets the reader in a mirror hall of dreams, where one’s nemesis (or one’s self) is always lurking around the corner. Violences of the waking life trickle into the narrator’s sleep as he flees from vision to vision, “picking fruit in one dream and eating it in the next.” In the book’s third and final section, as the poet begins to wake, he finds that the “real poem is the life I’m writing.” Mixon-Webster’s musings turn to love and the often-destructive desires it provokes in us as he grapples with how to carry the burden of a past that threatens to sabotage the future.

These are seeking, supple poems whose forms adapt to contain their transfigured images. What emerges in this daring second collection is a surreal and haunting portrait of life in modern America, where pitfalls hide in every promise.

A luminous and romantic debut novel in verse about navigating first love as a non-binary teenager.

I feel invincible.
Like I could run and run
and never stop for breath.

I feel a power in me
I didn't know I had.

The power to speak,
to say what I need.

Prema knows exactly who they are. Coming out as non-binary to their queer parents and best friend? A total non-event. Catching feelings for Blessing - the boy in drama club whose smile makes their heart race? That's trickier.

As their final year of school unfolds and the two of them grow closer, Prema starts to question: Does Blessing really see them? Or just a version of them that doesn't exist? They'd ask their best friend for advice, but she's busy falling in love too. . .

With gorgeous illustrations throughout, Bad Queer draws us deeply into queer friendship, family secrets, and the necessary act of loving yourself. Perfect for fans of Alice Oseman, Dean Atta, and Sarah Crossan.

This is a love letter to queer futures - tender, curious, and fiercely alive.

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In his debut collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man’s late-night encounter with a police officer—the titular “man in blue”—becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous erotic fantasy. The late Luther Vandross, resurrected here in a suite of poems, addresses the contradiction between his public persona and a life spent largely in the closet: “It’s a calling, this hunger / to sing for a love I’m too ashamed to want for myself.” In “Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum,” the convicted killer imagines the barrel of the gun he used to bludgeon Matthew Shepard as an “infant’s small mouth” as well as the “sad calculator” that was “built to subtract from and divide a town.” In these and other poems, Blount viscerally captures the experience of the “other” and locates us squarely within these personae.

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LGBTQ+ influencers Terrell and Jarius open up about their joyful love story and family life—and the challenges they've encountered along the way—in this honest, powerful guidebook.

Terrell and Jarius Joseph—a picturesque home, adorable children, family businesses, and millions of fans online. Love Out Loud is Terrell and Jarius’s guide to help couples of all kinds sustain their relationship and nurture their nontraditional family. With the Josephs’s essential roadmap you’ll learn how to:
* Define your needs as individuals and as a couple to build the life of your dreams
* Recognize growing pains before they hurt your marriage
* Break tradition to discover your unique parenting style
* Build a circle of support for your children

We all crave genuine love, belonging, and the freedom to be our true selves, no matter what our family unit looks like. Love Out Loud is the story of the Josephs’ quest to redefine fatherhood. After enduring a devastating miscarriage followed by two premature births by surrogacy just five weeks apart, Terrell and Jarius realized that to have the family of their dreams, they needed to live and love by their own rules. Filled with empathetic advice and a healthy dose of real talk, you, too, can discover how to build a relationship and family your way and build the life of your dreams.

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When a Mariachi star transfers schools, he expects to be handed his new group's lead vocalist spot―what he gets instead is a tenacious current lead with a very familiar, very kissable face. In a twenty-four-hour span, Rafael Alvarez led North Amistad High School’s Mariachi Alma de la Frontera to their eleventh consecutive first-place win in the Mariachi Extravaganza de Nacional; and met, made out with, and almost hooked up with one of the cutest guys he’s ever met. Now eight months later, Rafie’s ready for one final win. What he didn’t plan for is his family moving to San Antonio before his senior year, forcing him to leave behind his group while dealing with the loss of the most important person in his life―his beloved abuelo. Another hitch in his plan: The Selena Quintanilla-Perez Academy’s Mariachi Todos Colores already has a lead vocalist, Rey Chavez―the boy Rafie made out with―who now stands between him winning and being the great Mariachi Rafie's abuelo always believed him to be. Despite their newfound rivalry for center stage, Rafie can’t squash his feelings for Rey. Now he must decide between the people he’s known his entire life or the one just starting to get to know the real him. Canto Contigo is a love letter to Mexican culture, family and legacy, the people who shape us, and allowing ourselves to forge our own path. At its heart, this is one of the most glorious rivals-to-lovers romance about finding the one who challenges you in the most extraordinary ways.

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It's 1976 and Jamaica is on fire. The country is on the eve of important elections and the warring political parties have made the divisions between the poor and the wealthy even wider. And Irie and Jilly come from very different backgrounds: Irie is from the heart of Kingston, where fighting in the streets is common. Jilly is from the hills, where mansions nestled within lush gardens remain safe behind gates. But the two bond through a shared love of Reggae music, spending time together at Irie's father's record store, listening to so-called rebel music that opens Jilly's mind to a sound and a way of thinking she's never heard before.

As tensions build in the streets, so do tensions between the two girls. A budding romance between them complicates things further as the push and pull between their two lives becomes impossible to bear. For Irie, fighting—with her words and her voice—is her only option. Blood is shed on the streets in front of her every day. She has no choice. But Jilly can always choose to escape.

Can their bond survive this impossible divide?

Asha Bromfield has written a compelling, emotional and heart-rending story of a friendship during wartime and what it means to fight for your words, your life, and the love of your life.

A slantwise account of queer life in the twentieth century and a testament to the liberatory power of friendship.

A friendship is a filiation we choose. It holds love and laughter; it can extend our sense of the possible. Moved to honour a form of relation often subordinated to romantic and familial ties, and to explore a part of her own history, Hélène Giannecchini pieces together an alternative genealogy of queer ancestors. In searching and sensitive prose, she sifts the past to bring existences deemed ‘marginal’ into communion with each other, traces of which may remain only in memory and archival fragments. Roving from Casa Susanna, a space of freedom from persecution in McCarthyite North America, to the diary of a man living with HIV in France, and to the life and work of pioneering lesbian photographer Donna Gottschalk, each narrative counters oblivion through loving acts of witness. A slantwise gathering of queer life and activism in the twentieth century, interspersed with images encountered by chance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail establishes friendship as a vital political force and offers a moving testament to its liberatory power.

Masika Holt made peace with never seeing her best friend-and ex-lover-from high school ever again. She betrayed him, after all. But a change of heart puts her right on Aiden Zetrenne's doorstep with hopes of atonement. Despite her mistakes, he accepts the apology with open arms and allows her to stay in his home.

Betwixt confronting their traumatizing pasts and forging a new path together, the pair must face new challenges and trials; many far beyond what either of them could anticipate. With danger and oppressors lurking at every corner, with Evil stalking their every step, will the couple make it out alive without getting more blood on their hands?

Where the Stars Are is a captivating, gut-wrenching and powerful debut novel exploring gender identity, love, and reconciliation.

WARNING: This novel contains potentially triggering content. Please heed the content warnings listed on Micah Flowers' official website and at the beginning of the book.

The love child of The L Word and Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends, with a disaffected flair all its own.
It’s San Francisco in the early aughts, and Howie Song is floundering. His failed projects—as a professional ballet dancer, as a boyfriend, as a friend—have left him forever the “third wheel.” But maybe he likes it that way? Leaping wildly between lovers, centuries, and an ever-changing cultural landscape, Howie might just feel most himself in the fracture.

Delicious, poetic, and delightfully pornographic, Tricyclist is an ode to the “abnormal angles” of people and art. As Howie overcomes his own ambivalences—in large part thanks to two suitors, and a circle of supporters who happen to be lesbians—Joon Oluchi Lee portrays, with his signature flamboyance, all of life’s joys, pitfalls, and pirouettes.

A manifesto from one of America's most influential activists which disrupts political, economic, and social norms by reimagining the Black Radical Tradition.

Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.

Nonbinary Life is an invitation to imagine the possibilities of life outside of gender.

To write, to think, to imagine, to agitate, and to love without regard for gender is to lead a non-binary life. In this genre-defying work of autotheory, Marquis Bey proposes a radical refusal: to relinquish gender as a framework we carry - for ourselves and for others - and to embrace modes of being that exist outside of its grasp.

Spanning questions of pronouns, masculinity, love, family, language, and even the Redwood National Forest, Nonbinary Life blends memoir and theory to provide a philosophical meditation on what it means to live beyond the binary

It's back to school for the Hillside Valley kids! Sol's trying out for the middle school soccer team but will a crush on the team captain distract her from her goals? Find out in this new Hillside Valley graphic novel—filled with friendship, first crushes, and some impressive soccer skills!

Welcome back to Hillside Valley-this time it's Game On for Sol!

Twelve-year-old Sol is a great friend, a model student, a beloved daughter and a star soccer player. At least that's what everyone always expects of her. But when the soccer team captain Lily walks by, Sol starts to lose focus. What's with this heart fluttering feeling she has around Lily?! And how can she stay the star player--the star everything--that people see her as if she can barely remember her name (much less how to play soccer) around Lily? Is Sol destined to let everyone down, including herself? Or can she figure out how to be the Sol she wants to be...on and off the field. Settle back into the cozy community of Hillside Valley in this second irresistible graphic novel! And don’t miss the first Hillside Valley Graphic Novel, Speak Up, Santiago!

From acclaimed author K. Ancrum, on the National Book Award longlist for The Corruption of Hollis Brown, and Lambda Literary Award winner for Icarus, comes a queer romantic horror thriller that is a love letter to Frankenstein about the consequences of our decisions, the legacy of family, and the depths we’ll go to be forgiven.

Victor Frankenstein is a young, wealthy, and brilliant prodigy who wants nothing more than to prove himself and change the world. His plan to right what he feels is wrong with the world? Reanimation of the sick and dying, bringing them back to life. But no one will give him the chance to prove his genius. However, one drunken night a bet is made, one that will cause Victor to do the unspeakable: take a teen boy from a small, neighboring village, and experiment on him under the dark of night. Elias Hilfiker. The boy who would become his monster. His curse. When Elias awakens, his voice is gone, his skin is stitched, scarred, and branded with strange symbols, and he’s abandoned by his loved ones. Meanwhile, Victor embarks on a journey to discover how to reverse the horror he’s unleashed, visiting dark alchemists in lands far and wide, gripped by fear and guilt.

But Victor’s act of resurrection creates a tether to Elias, leaving them feeling each other’s pain, joy, and regret, as the two each seek a way to end the other. As the two bound boys continue to search for answers and forgiveness, vengeance and mercy, the boundaries between what makes a man and what makes a monster will only get more blurred.

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A manifesto from one of America's most influential activists which disrupts political, economic, and social norms by reimagining the Black Radical Tradition.

Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.

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In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960’s and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure.

If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in queer theory, Nyong’o posits queerness as “angular sociality,” drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.

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A profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time

Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom.

Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra’s 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar “speculations” of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.

Celebrate the release of Love Cake with author, Douglas Bell!

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, May 18, 2024 at 2 PM

Where: Kindred Stories Reading Garden (2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004)

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat. RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our programming.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Love Cake is contemporary fiction about Bryan Hicks and his transgender girlfriend, Nadia Brooks. Together they own and operate a bakery in conservative Texas. At its red velvet core, Love Cake is a story about how love persists in the face of prejudice and about the value of found family. It speaks to the power of loving people despite the mistakes they make.

With thought-provoking insight, Douglas Bell in Love Cake, the second book of The Cakes Series duology and the sequel to Cake Walk, rings a bell again on an untold story that teaches how we can find the courage to show up for each other as the world tries to tear us apart.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Douglas Bell is a fiction writer based in the bustling city of Houston, Texas. He draws inspiration from a variety of sources, including the teachings of Buddha and the Dalai Lama, as well as the powerful storytelling of James Baldwin. When he's not writing, you can usually find him hitting the gym, experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen, or staying up to date with the latest fashion trends. 

This “vivid, moving, funny, and heartfelt” memoir tells the story of Curtis Chin’s time growing up as a gay Chinese American kid in 1980’s Detroit (Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers).

Nineteen eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone—from the city’s first Black mayor to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to elderly Jewish couples—could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, or American-born Chinese; where he navigated the divided city’s spiraling misfortunes; and where—between helpings of almond boneless chicken, sweet-and-sour pork, and some of his own, less-savory culinary concoctions—he realized just how much he had to offer to the world, to his beloved family, and to himself.

Served up by the cofounder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and structured around the very menu that graced the tables of Chung’s, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant is both a memoir and an invitation: to step inside one boy’s childhood oasis, scoot into a vinyl booth, and grow up with him—and perhaps even share something off the secret menu.

An American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book—Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award
A 2024 Michigan Notable Book
Best Nonfiction Books of the Year—Kirkus Reviews
Best Books of the Year—Apple Books
 
TIME’s Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2023 • San Francisco Chronicle’s Highly Anticipated Books to Put on Your Radar This Fall 2023 • Washington Post’s Books to Read This Fall 2023 • Eater’s Best Food Books to Read 2023 • Lambda Literary Review’s October’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature

#1 New York Times Bestselling cartoonist Johnnie Christmas and Prism Award Nominee Dante Luiz bring you a haunted tale of love, ghosts, and coffee beans.

Esme, a barista, feels invisible, like a ghost... also, when Esme drinks too much coffee she actually sees ghosts. Yara, the elegant heir to a coffee plantation, is always seen, but only has eyes for Esme. Their world is turned upside down when the strange ghost of an old-world nobleman begs Esme to take his letter from New York City to a haunted coffee farm in Brazil, to reunite him with his lost love of a century ago. Bringing sinister tidings of unrequited love.

Collects the ComiXology original digital graohic novel Crema in print for the first time.

Love, one fitting at a time?

Calisha "Cal" Duke, a bespoke tailor with a dapper flair, thrives in her world of men's fashion. As a third-generation tailor, she feels pressure to uphold the sterling family tradition and name, but also wants to carve out a path that is uniquely hers.

When Rocky Beckford, a striking new client, requests a custom-made suit for a wedding, sparks fly, leaving Cal questioning her feelings and her reputation. This is the first time she's ever crushed hard on a client, and onanother stud.

As Cal and Rocky explore this unexpected connection together, will they find out if genuine chemistry transcends labels?

A young professor grapples with homophobia in Muslim Senegal in this searching, heart-wrenching novel from the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Most Secret Memory of Men.

A viral video makes the rounds in Dakar, showing an incensed crowd that gathers to dig up a grave and drag the corpse from holy ground. When Ndéné, a French literature teacher, watches it, he’s surprisingly affected. Who was this man, and what could he have done to deserve such a fate? The answer soon becomes clear: he was a “góor-jigéen,” one of the so-called “men-women,” the shameful label given to homosexuals, cross-dressers, or any man who lives outside the accepted norm.

Haunted by the video, Ndéné sets out to learn more. With the help of a friend who works in night life, he explores a hidden side of Dakar, away from the rigid Islam of his family and university. Although he feels a certain disgust for homosexuality, he’s moved by the suffering and resilience of the people he meets. But the further he goes, the more he doubts his own identity, threatening to become an object of suspicion and scorn himself.

A powerful, nuanced portrait of queerness in a conservative society, Pure Men asks the fundamental question of how to find the courage to be true to yourself, whatever the cost.

"This heartfelt sapphic romance is loaded with laugh-out-loud humor and the high-drama hijinks of a splashy telenovela." —Camille Perri, author of When Katie Met Cassidy

One wedding, two rivals and a whole lot of secrets…

As the daughter of Cuban immigrants, Isabella Valdes knows three things for certain:
* her late father’s restaurant is thriving
* she owns lots of designer things
* both of those statements are absolute lies to make her mother happy

Isabella would do anything to keep her father’s legacy alive, including attending her estranged cousin’s weeklong wedding extravaganza. Because once Sofia’s wealthy fiancé tastes the recipes Isa prepares from her father’s cherished journal, he’s sure to invest.

To Isa’s annoyance, she’ll be sharing a cabin with Valentina, the former friend turned rival who ruined her quinceañera. But Val is offering an unexpected deal—she’ll help Isa unravel an old family secret found in her father’s journal in return for help sabotaging the wedding and winning the heart of the bride.

Saying yes is a bad idea. Isa’s perfectionism meets its match in Val’s carefree demeanor, but as they work together, the usually responsible Isa can’t seem to say no to Val’s shenanigans. There’s no hiding from Val, no ignoring this complicated but undeniable connection that’s changing Isa’s beliefs about love, loyalty and just how much she owes to her family—and to herself…

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Long-listed for the Booker Prize

A radiant, intimate novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer―about family, desire, and what we inherit.

When his grandfather dies, Jay travels south with his family to the property they’ve inherited, a once-flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.

Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.

Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members begin to confront their own secrets and regrets. Jack is a professor at a struggling local college whose failures might have begun when he married his student, Sui Ching. Sui Ching does her best to keep the family together, though she too wonders what her life could have been. And Fong, the manager, refuses to look at what is: at Chuan, at the land, at the global forces that threaten to render his whole life obsolete.

At once sweeping and compressed, Tash Aw’s The South is a family novel of change and desire―a story of what happens when public and private lives collide, told with uncommon grace and beauty.

A queer Palestinian refugee plans to come out at his elaborate birthday dinner party in this tragicomic modern reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

Firas Dareer wakes up on his twenty-third birthday with a sense of purpose: today he’ll jump from a Stage 3 to a Stage 6 in his self-determined Coming Out Scale, professing his sexuality to a captive audience of immediate and extended family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and neighbours. But despite the meticulously designed invitations, carefully chosen place settings and floral centerpieces, painstakingly curated playlist, and agonizingly fretted-over menu, factors begin to spin out of his control.

Threatening to thwart his big moment are his younger brother, whose mental fragility requires him to be monitored at all times; his cantankerous grandfather, who’s just completed his third escape from the retirement home; the Dareers’ embittered housekeeper (and Firas’s arch nemesis), who could scoop the story before he gets the chance; his harried boss, who on this of all days calls him into work at the architecture firm, where his colleagues share a talent for butchering his name; and his mother, whose accidental text message may have blown the cover of an illicit extra-marital affair. There’s also the fact that Firas too has found himself in a love triangle of sorts, choosing between soft and steady Tyrese and fiery Kashif, who makes a sport out of demonstrating how Palestinian he is.

As the future Firas has precisely architected for himself slips further out of his grasp, the past comes crashing in like a wrecking ball. Sharp, darkly funny, and full of surprises, Three Parties pays twisted homage to a literary classic, gleefully upends the western coming-out narrative, and sensitively explores the traumas and pressures faced by Palestinian immigrants—all in the span of a single life-changing day.

Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction

Daddy Issues is a collection of moving and complex—yet simply and directly told—stories of queer Asian American experiences in Los Angeles. In many of these stories, the protagonists are artists and writers and other creative thinkers living on the fringe of survival, attempting to align a life of the imagination with the practical considerations of career, income, and family: a gay father who hasn’t come out to his young son; a social worker, numbed by the destitution of his clients, who finds himself lost in self-destruction; a trans man who returns home to a father with dementia to help his family pack as they are pushed out by gentrification; a husband who can only stand aside as his wife heals from a miscarriage; and a broke writer who learns to love his stories again.

The stories in Daddy Issues offer different contemplations on solitude—the good and the bad of it. Ultimately, this collection by Eric C. Wat is full of hope, and it shows how we can find the connections we need once we allow ourselves to become vulnerable.

A Coretta Scott King Honor Book

Three-time Newbery Honor author Jacqueline Woodson explores race and sexuality through the eyes of a compelling narrator

Melanin Sun has a lot to say. But sometimes it's hard to speak his mind, so he fills up notebooks with his thoughts instead. He writes about his mom a lot--they're about as close as they can be, because they have no other family. So when she suddenly tells him she's gay, his world is turned upside down. And if that weren't hard enough for him to accept, her girlfriend is white. Melanin Sun is angry and scared. How can his mom do this to him-- is this the end of their closeness? What will his friends think? And can he let her girlfriend be part of their family?

After reconnecting on a road trip, two friends must decide if love is the ultimate risk worth taking in this funny, emotional sapphic romance.

Nia and Jade had been inseparable ever since their best friend, Michal, introduced them at her tenth birthday party. But now it’s been three years since Michal died of cancer― since the brutal fight Nia and Jade had in the weeks after― and they're barely on speaking terms.

Until Nia reads a letter Michal wrote for her 29th birthday, asking her and Jade to go on the southern Jewish history road trip they'd planned before she died. To add to the complications, Michal's then-boyfriend and Jade's twin brother, Jonah, joins the trip. Despite the years apart and Jade and Jonah’s strained relationship, any awkwardness quickly disappears as it becomes clear how much Nia and Jade have missed each other.

Unfortunately, old issues soon arise. Nia has been in love with Jade since they were teenagers, and Jade has been so committed to their friendship that she never let herself consider something more. As the stops pass, tensions mount, running high until Nia and Jade are forced to confront what happened three years ago, their feelings for one another, and even their respective relationships with Jonah.

Rachel Runya Katz’s Whenever You’re Ready is about family, friendship, and the kind of first love that could last a lifetime―if only you are willing to take a chance.

"Poignant, tender, and swoony, Whenever You're Ready is an instant favorite from an auto-buy author." - Alison Cochrun, Lambda award-winning author of Kiss Her Once for Me and Here We Go Again

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As his twenty-sixth birthday approaches, Desta Joy Walker finds himself in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the one place he's been actively avoiding most of his life. For Desta, the East African capital encompasses some of the happiest and saddest parts of his life-his first home and the place where his father died. When an unavoidable work obligation lands him there for twelve weeks, he may finally have a chance for the closure he so desperately needs. What Desta never expected was to catch a glimpse of his future as he reconnects with the beautiful country and his family's past.

Elias Fikru has never met an opportunity he hasn't seized. Except, of course, for the life-changing one, he's stubbornly ignored for the past nine months. He'd be a fool not to accept the chance to pursue his doctoral studies in the U.S., but saying yes means leaving his homeland, and Elias isn't ready to make that commitment.

Meeting Desta, the Dominican-American emergency relief worker with the easy smile and sad eyes, makes Elias want things he's never envisioned for himself. Rediscovering his country through Desta's eyes emboldens Elias to reach for a future where he can be open about every part of himself. But when something threatens the future that's within their grasp, Elias and Desta must put it all on the line for love.

Enter St. Paradise, a city pulsing with blood magic, where clan secrets and shifting allegiances rule the land. For the first time, bestselling novelist Akwaeke Emezi brings their powerful talents to epic fantasy!

Ten years ago, Eclipse Orinabe and her aunt, Silver, were the sole survivors of a massacre that nearly wiped out their clan.

Then the Orinabe unleash their revenge: the annihilation of the clans who betrayed them, and the release of rapture, a drug so potent that the clan—once peaceful pharmaceutical makers—soon have St. Paradise in a chokehold.

Disturbed by the Orinabe’s bloody rise, the surviving clan leaders nonetheless make nice with Silver, known as the Butcher, and accept Eclipse—a weapon disguised as a glamorous clan princess—into society.

With the foundations of St. Paradise trembling, one spark will set the city aflame. And embers are everywhere: Wolf, Heir to the Goldshot clan, is on the run from his own people, armed with holy golden bullets. He claims sanctuary with Clan Heron, spies so secretive that no one knows their true Heir.

Noah, Heir to the psychic Solarin clan, is pushed into a consuming relationship with Eclipse by his clan leaders. But neither Heir is what the other thinks—and the secret Noah is keeping is powerful enough to blink out St. Paradise’s entire existence in an instant.

An ancient magic ties these clans together and a brutal reckoning will come as the Heirs collide and claim their fraught inheritance.

Emotionally rich, explosively thrilling, and finely wrought as all of Emezi’s work, their new standalone novel is perfect for fans of the author or Fonda Lee, R.F. Kuang, and V.E. Schwab.

For the first time in print! A definitive compilation of Nikki Giovanni’s best and most beloved poems from her extraordinary 60-year career.

Nikki Giovanni’s poems are some of the most quoted, most memorable, and most talked about gems in American literature, with a huge pop culture following that continues even after her death in 2024. But there has never been a single “best of” volume of her work—until now.

The Essential Poems compiles Nikki’s most beloved and thought-provoking work, drawn from her extraordinary 60+ year career. Included here are classics like “Nikki-Rosa,” “Ego Trippin’,” “Housecleaning,” “Cotton Candy for a Rainy Day,” “Bicycles,” and “The Sterling Silver Mirror.” Edited by Dr. Virginia Fowler, Nikki’s widow, it also includes an Introduction and an Afterword by literary superstars Kwame Alexander and Renée Watson.

It is a book to be savored, and shared.

A new book of poems from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips.

Is this who I must be,
or maybe just
what I am?

“Sir” is an honorific, a title that indicates the superiority of its recipient, the subordination of its speaker. Carl Phillips’s SIR examines power and submission, abandon and restraint, whether in our personal, intimate relationships with others and ourselves, or in our relationships with such abstract masters as grief, memory, desire, regret, and the traumas of history. These are all things we’re told to try to overcome, to gain mastery of. Do we have a choice, though? And if so, how to choose ‘correctly,’ in a time when appearance and reality are constantly in flux, when hierarchy is revealed to be a matter of perspective, when even language itself is suspect, with its ability both to structure emotion and to estrange us from it?

In poems filled with tenderness, moral inquiry, and self-reckoning, stretched across natural landscapes both familiar and uncertain, SIR confirms–once again–that Carl Phillips is one of our finest and most enduring poets writing today.