Collection: Shop Queer

Moving the conversation beyond transgender inclusion to demonstrate the unique and vital theological insights transgender Christians can provide the church.

Father Shannon Kearns is familiar with liminal spaces. He's lived in them his whole life. And while his experience as a transgender man has often made it difficult for him to fit in--especially in the context of Christianity--it has also shaped his perspective in important ways on complicated, gender-transgressing aspects of theology and Scripture.

In the Margins weaves stories from Shannon's life into reflections on well-known biblical narratives--such as Jacob wrestling with the divine, Rahab and the Israelite spies, Ezekiel and the dry bones, and the transfiguration of Jesus. In each chapter, Shannon shows how stories have helped him make sense of his own identity, and how those same stories can unlock the transformative power of faith for those willing to listen with an open mind and stand alongside him in the in-between.

Alaska Lane's poetry took TikTok by storm, reaching millions with her words of comfort and light. Here she shares some of her most popular works in print alongside never before seen poems. Let her unspoken words carry you on a journey through the darkest nights of the soul and into the hope of the dawn:

at the very root of it all, the truth is that

i didn't know how to accept myself. i was never taught how to.

i always felt painfully misunderstood

like a star that accidentally fell to earth.

labelled a mistake and torn apart until i had nothing left.

i lost myself in a war i unwillingly fought against the world.

there was nothing i could've done to make it okay

or convince her there was a light waiting for her at the end of her pain.

but although she's gone, although she can't read this,

i tried to honor her memory through writing down what i had left of her.

i made these pages into a place for her soul to rest.

and i told the world all the things she wasn't able to convey.

on her behalf, these are the words i'll never say.

In her groundbreaking first book, Gender Born, Gender Made, Dr. Diane Ehrensaft coined the term gender creative to describe children whose unique gender expression or sense of identity is not defined by a checkbox on their birth certificate. Now, with The Gender Creative Child, she returns to guide parents and professionals through the rapidly changing cultural, medical, and legal landscape of gender and identity.

In this up-to-date, comprehensive resource, Dr. Ehrensaft explains the interconnected effects of biology, nurture, and culture to explore why gender can be fluid, rather than binary. As an advocate for the gender affirmative model and with the expertise she has gained over three decades of pioneering work with children and families, she encourages caregivers to listen to each child, learn their particular needs, and support their quest for a true gender self.

The Gender Creative Child unlocks the door to a gender-expansive world, revealing pathways for positive change in our schools, our communities, and the world.

"Remember when you pinkie promised you'd help me bury a body? Is that offer still good?"

TWILIGHT meets JENNIFER'S BODY in this bite-sized sapphic vampire romance full of sweetness, snark, gore, and only one motel bed.

Queen bee Honey Williams and burnout Sadie Greer haven't spoken since middle school, when a huge fight ended their lifelong friendship and sent the girls down wildly different paths.

All of this changes when Honey turns up at 3am to ask Sadie to help her bury a body and kill the indie band that turned her into a vampire.

It's the tail end of summer vacation. They've got the band's tour dates, a full tank of gas and two weeks before senior year starts.

Despite all the bloody motel rooms and near-misses with murder, Sadie and Honey grow reluctantly close for the first time since they were kids.

But every road ends, and Honey's bloodlust isn't the only thing threatening to destroy their healing friendship...

An unexpected love quadrangle with a dash of unrequited love as two classmates, a boy and a girl, begin to fall for each other when each of their best friends have already fallen for them.

Love is already hard enough, but it becomes an unnavigable maze for unassuming high school student Taichi Ichinose and his shy classmate Futaba Kuze when they begin to fall for each other after their same-sex best friends have already fallen for them.

The culture festival begins, and Toma and Taichi talk about their futures, but it ends with the two not quite seeing eye to eye. Shortly after, Toma sits down with Mami for a serious discussion, and in response to her earnest openness, he makes a big decision that could change everything. Time keeps moving forward, pushing everyone to the cusp of making critical life choices.

Winner of the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

Winner of a 2020 Whiting Award in Poetry

Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry

Selected by Kathy Fagan as a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is a debut collection of poems by a dazzling geologist of queer eros.

Drunktown, New Mexico, is a place where men "only touch when they fuck in a backseat." Its landscape is scarred by violence: done to it, done on it, done for it. Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, "the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all."

But if Jake Skeets's collection is an unflinching portrait of the actual west, it is also a fierce reclamation of a living place--full of beauty as well as brutality, whose shadows are equally capable of protecting encounters between boys learning to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover's body: A spine becomes a railroad. "Veins burst oil, elk black." And "becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal." Rooted in Navajo history and thought, these poems show what has been brewing in an often forgotten part of the American literary landscape, an important language, beautiful and bone dense.

Sculptural, ambitious, and defiantly vulnerable, the poems of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers are coal that remains coal, despite the forces that conspire for diamond, for electricity.

Additional recognition:

Named a "Best Poetry Book of 2019" by Electric Literature, Entropy Mag, and Auburn Avenue

Named a "Favorite Book of 2019" by Lit Hub

Named a "Best Queer Book of 2019" by BuzzFeed and Book Marks

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The inspiring true story of transgender actor and activist Nicole Maines, whose identical twin brother, Jonas, and ordinary American family join her on an extraordinary journey to understand, nurture, and celebrate the uniqueness in us all.

Nicole appears as TV's first transgender superhero on CW's Supergirl

When Wayne and Kelly Maines adopted identical twin boys, they thought their lives were complete. But by the time Jonas and Wyatt were toddlers, confusion over Wyatt's insistence that he was female began to tear the family apart. In the years that followed, the Maineses came to question their long-held views on gender and identity, to accept Wyatt's transition to Nicole, and to undergo a wrenching transformation of their own, the effects of which would reverberate through their entire community. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Amy Ellis Nutt spent almost four years reporting this story and tells it with unflinching honesty, intimacy, and empathy. In her hands, Becoming Nicole is more than an account of a courageous girl and her extraordinary family. It's a powerful portrait of a slowly but surely changing nation, and one that will inspire all of us to see the world with a little more humanity and understanding.

Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by People - One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review and Men's Journal - A Stonewall Honor Book in Nonfiction - Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction

"Fascinating and enlightening."--Cheryl Strayed

"If you aren't moved by Becoming Nicole, I'd suggest there's a lump of dark matter where your heart should be."--The New York Times

"Exceptional . . . 'Stories move the walls that need to be moved, ' Nicole told her father last year. In telling Nicole's story and those of her brother and parents luminously, and with great compassion and intelligence, that is exactly what Amy Ellis Nutt has done here."--The Washington Post

"A profoundly moving true story about one remarkable family's evolution."--People

"Becoming Nicole is a miracle. It's the story of a family struggling with--and embracing--a transgender child. But more than that, it's about accepting one another, and ourselves, in all our messy, contradictory glory."--Jennifer Finney Boylan, former co-chair of GLAAD and author of She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders

Porsha Olayiwola's debut poetry collection soars with the power and presence of live performance.

These poems dip their hands into the fabric of black womanhood and revel in it. Shimmer establishes Olayiwola firmly in the lineage of black queer poetics, celebrating the work done by generations of poets from Audre Lorde to Danez Smith.

Each poem is a gentle breaking and an inventive reconstruction. This is a book of self and community-care―in pursuit of building a world that will not only keep you alive but will keep you joyful.


Advance praise for i shimmer sometime, too

In Porsha Olayiwola's capable hands, language becomes elastic, becomes kaleidoscopic. i shimmer sometimes, too is cinematic, is magic, and graceful education in the possibilities of form
-Safia Elillo, Author Of The January Children

In language that is both pungent and poignant, Porsha Olayiwola plumbs a dispora of resilience, rich in ringshouts and inner-city blues chanted to the sky. i shimmer sometimes, too is luminous indeed.
-Jabari Asim, Author of We Can't Breathe

Each poem is a lesson, a story, a mirror that Olayiwola holds up to ensure we pay attention to that which we may have overlooked.
-Clint Smith, Author of Counting Descent

"Perfectly wonderful." --Becky Albertalli, New York Times-bestselling author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

"An electrifying love story." --Booklist

From nationally and internationally bestselling and Indie Next Pick author Sophie Gonzales comes Perfect on Paper: Leah on the Offbeat meets To All the Boys I've Loved Before in this YA romcom, where a bisexual girl who gives anonymous love advice to her classmates is hired by the hot guy to help him get his ex back

Her advice, spot on. Her love life, way off.

Darcy Phillips:
- Can give you the solution to any of your relationship woes--for a fee.
- Uses her power for good. Most of the time.
- Really cannot stand Alexander Brougham.
- Has maybe not the best judgement when it comes to her best friend, Brooke...who is in love with someone else.
- Does not appreciate being blackmailed.

However, when Brougham catches her in the act of collecting letters from locker 89--out of which she's been running her questionably legal, anonymous relationship advice service--that's exactly what happens. In exchange for keeping her secret, Darcy begrudgingly agrees to become his personal dating coach--at a generous hourly rate, at least. The goal? To help him win his ex-girlfriend back.

Darcy has a good reason to keep her identity secret. If word gets out that she's behind the locker, some things she's not proud of will come to light, and there's a good chance Brooke will never speak to her again.

Okay, so all she has to do is help an entitled, bratty, (annoyingly hot) guy win over a girl who's already fallen for him once? What could go wrong?

From debut author Lio Min comes BEATING HEART BABY, a tender love letter to internet friendships, anime, and indie rock, perfect for fans of HEARTSTOPPER

When artistic and sensitive Santi arrives at his new high school, everyone in the wildly talented marching band welcomes him with open arms. Everyone except for the prickly, proud musical prodigy Suwa, who doesn't think Santi has what it takes to be in the band.

But Santi and Suwa share painful pasts, and when they open up to each other, a tentative friendship begins. And soon, that friendship turns into something more. . . .

Will their fresh start rip at the seams as Suwa seeks out a solo spotlight, and both boys come to terms with what it'll take, and what they'll have to let go, to realize their dreams?

A finalist for the Believer Book Award

Emerson Whitney writes, "Really, I can't explain myself without making a mess." What follows is that mess-electrifying, gorgeous, defiant.

At Heaven's center, Whitney seeks to understand their relationship to their mother and grandmother, those first windows into womanhood and all its consequences. Whitney retraces a roving youth in deeply observant, psychedelic prose-all the while folding in the work of thinkers like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and C. Riley Snorton-to engage transness and the breathing, morphing nature of selfhood.

An expansive examination of what makes us up, Heaven wonders what role our childhood plays in who we are. Can we escape the discussion of causality? Is the story of our body just ours? With extraordinary emotional force, Whitney sways between theory and memory in order to explore these brazen questions and write this unforgettable book.
"A forceful act of writing."
-Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

"A poetic, candid, probing reckoning with childhood, the maternal, gender, and the possibilities of theory which will both speak to its time and outlast it."
-Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

"An incisive, nuanced inquiry into gender and body."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

'I wish I had a book like this when I was growing up' PARIS LEES
'Wonderful and ground-breaking' MERMAIDS

Frank, friendly and funny, the Trans Teen Survival Guide will leave transgender and non-binary teens informed, empowered and armed with all the tips, confidence and practical advice they need to navigate life as a trans teen.

Wondering how to come out to your family and friends, what it's like to go through cross hormonal therapy or how to put on a packer? Trans youth activists Fox and Owl have stepped in to answer everything that trans teens and their families need to know.

With a focus on self-care, expression and being proud of your unique identity, the guide is packed full of invaluable advice from people who understand the realities and complexities of growing up trans. Having been there, done that, Fox and Owl are able to honestly chart the course of life as a trans teen, from potentially life-saving advice on dealing with dysphoria or depression, to hilarious real-life awkward trans stories.

A Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Poetry

A CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in Poetry

A Bustle Best Book of 2020

A Refinery29 Best New Book of Fall 2020

"Some girls are not made," torrin a. greathouse writes, "but spring from the dirt." Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound--selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry--challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates "buckteeth & ulcer." She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead.

These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse's poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. "I'm still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral."

Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse--elegant, vicious, "a one-girl armageddon" draped in crushed velvet--teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.

Additional recognition:

A New York Times Book Review "New & Noteworthy Poetry Collection"

An NBC Out "Best LGBTQ Book to Gift This Holiday Season"

A Book Marks "Most Anticipated Poetry Collection of Fall/Winter 2020"

A Lambda "Most Anticipated LGBTQ Book of December 2020"

A Chicago Review of Books "Must-Read Book of December 2020"

A poetry compilation recounting a woman's journey from self-loathing to self-acceptance, confusion to clarity, and bitterness to forgiveness

Following in the footsteps of such category killers as Milk and Honey and Whiskey Words & a Shovel I, Fariha Róisín's poetry book is a collection of her thoughts as a young, queer, Muslim femme navigating the difficulties of her intersectionality. Simultaneously, this compilation unpacks the contentious relationship that exists between Róisín and her mother, her platonic and romantic heartbreaks, and the cognitive dissonance felt as a result of being so divided among her broad spectrum of identities.

Caroline Cash's gay, modern take on the '60s underground comic continues! In this issue: tales of an adolescent expedition to Victoria's Secret, an ode to a favorite bar, and more late-night bad decisions. Features a cardstock foil cover and stickers!