Folk musician, Broadway composer, and disability advocate Gaelynn Lea's warm, funny, poignant memoir is a love letter to every kind of body, to music, and to making it work––inspiring us to embrace all of life's experiences with heart and determination   Gaelynn Lea was born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta. Her parents were loving, cash-strapped theater kids, and she grew up racing about in her first electric wheelchair, taking adaptive ballet classes, and handing out playbills at her parents' dinner theater shows. Transfixed by an orchestra performance in 5th grade, Gaelynn was determined to play the cello. When her shortened limbs made playing the instrument challenging, she employed a familiar adapting. What if she held a violin upright in her wheelchair, like the world's tiniest cello? That what if was the key that unlocked her lifelong music career. After winning NPR Music's Tiny Desk Concert in 2016, Lea became a full-time touring musician—and that's when she began truly to struggle with the inaccessibility of the music world. Out of necessity, she became a dedicated advocate and activist, pushing back against the prevailing stereotypes, assumptions, and barriers with her own gently defiant style. Lea's warm, funny, deeply-felt memoir addresses love and faith, sexuality and mortality, the frustration and the joy of difference. She shows how disability inspires and enables unique and indispensable contributions to the world, and reminds readers to think creatively, fight for what they love, and savor the journey.

In this delightfully compelling full-color graphic memoir, the author shares her process of undoing the effects of a patriarchal, colonial society on her self-image, her sexuality, and her concept of freedom. Reflecting on the ways in which oppression was the cause for her late bloom into queerness, we are invited to discover people and things in the author's life that helped shape and inform her LGBTQ identity. And we come to an understanding of her holistic definition of queerness.

What does it mean to be trans? Non-Binary? Gender Expansive? What parts of gender come from society? What parts come from within? How much is biology, and how much is socialization? Part of the Really Strange series, this science-based graphic medicine comic addresses these questions and more, revealing the inherent messiness of gender identity and sex. A mysterious amalgam of biology and society, inherently sensed, yet societally-defined, the complexity of gender is revealed through examining neuroscience, biology, hormones, mental health, behaviour and how much of gender comes from society. Exploring theories, thinkers, terminology, history and gender cultures around the world and across different religions, this easy-to-understand and engaging book will help you to question perceived norms and engage critically with your own gender identity. Get ready to break down the binary B.S. and celebrate gender in all its messy glory!

An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity. In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the stories of her grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself. Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After eight years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school―and promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution. Rose eventually came to the United States on a scholarship and brought Sun Yi to live with her. Tessa watched her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi's unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother’s smothering fear, Tessa left home and traveled to the farthest-flung corners of the globe (Antarctica). But at the age of thirty, it starts to feel less like freedom and more like running away, and she returns to face the history that shaped her. Gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Hulls' homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, it exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.

Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour-de-force that tells the story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall’s efforts to uncover the truth about these women warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record. Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. Wake tells the story of Dr. Rebecca Hall, a historian, granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery. The accepted history of slave revolts has always told her that enslaved women took a back seat. But Rebecca decides to look deeper, and her journey takes her through old court records, slave ship captain’s logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the “negro burying ground” uncovered in Manhattan. She finds women warriors everywhere. Using in-depth archival research and a measured use of historical imagination, Rebecca constructs the likely pasts of Adono and Alele, women rebels who fought for freedom during the Middle Passage, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. We also follow Rebecca’s own story as the legacy of slavery shapes life, both during her time as a successful attorney and later as a historian seeking the past that haunts her. Illustrated beautifully in black and white, Wake will take its place alongside classics of the graphic novel genre, like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The story of both a personal and national legacy, it is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake.

Through the lens of horror—from "Halloween" to "Hereditary"—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences. Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet—spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world. "It Came from the Closet" features twenty-five original essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. From Carmen Maria Machado on "Jennifer’s Body", Jude Ellison S. Doyle on "In My Skin", Addie Tsai on "Dead Ringers", and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror.

Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero. Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous–it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.

From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. Perfect for fans of Jason Reynolds, Walter Dean Myers, and Elizabeth Acevedo. The story that I thought was my life didn’t start on the day I was born Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he’s seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. “Boys just being boys” turns out to be true only when those boys are white. The story that I think will be my life starts today Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal’s bright future is upended: he is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and sent to prison. Despair and rage almost sink him until he turns to the refuge of his words, his art. This never should have been his story. But can he change it? With spellbinding lyricism, award-winning author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam tell a moving and deeply profound story about how one boy is able to maintain his humanity and fight for the truth, in a system designed to strip him of both.

A boy comes to terms with his identity as a mixed-race gay teen - then at university he finds his wings as a drag artist, The Black Flamingo. A bold story about the power of embracing your uniqueness. Sometimes, we need to take charge, to stand up wearing pink feathers - to show ourselves to the world in bold colour.

An ancient race of lycanthropes has survived to the present day, and its numbers are growing. Bent on dominance, rival factions are initiating the down-and-out of L.A. into their ranks. Caught in the middle are Anthony, a kindhearted, lovesick dogcatcher, and the object of his affection: a female werewolf who has abandoned her pack.

Black transgender luminary Tourmaline brings to life the first definitive biography of the revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most important and remarkable figures in LGBTQIA+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy. “She is the preeminent and foremost scholar on Marsha P. Johnson. . . . To us, Tourmaline is the expert.”—Janet Mock, Allure “Thank god the revolution has begun, honey.” Rumor has it that after Marsha P. Johnson threw the first brick in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, she picked up a shard of broken mirror to fix her makeup. Marsha, a legendary Black transgender activist, embodied both the beauty and the struggle of the early gay rights movement. Her work sparked the progress we see today, yet there has never been a definitive record of her life. Until now.    Written with sparkling prose, Tourmaline’s richly researched biography Marsha finally brings this iconic figure to life, in full color. We vividly meet Marsha as both an activist and She performed with RuPaul and with the internationally renowned drag troupe The Hot Peaches. She was a muse to countless artists from Andy Warhol to the band Earth, Wind & Fire. And she continues to inspire people today.   Marsha didn’t wait to be freed; she declared herself free and told the world to catch up. Her story promises to inspire readers to live as their most liberated, unruly, vibrant, and whole selves.