Must-Read Queer Writers of Color

A darkly comic memoir-in-essays about the scam of the American Dream and doing whatever it takes to survive in the Sunshine State — from the award-winning author of High-Risk Homosexual.

Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: A second chance.

A photographic celebration of the love and relationships of queer people of color. This singular, moving collection offers an intimate look at what it means to live at the intersections of queer and POC identities today, and honors an inclusive vision of love, affection, and family across the spectrum of gender, race, and age.

What makes a family? How is it defined and by whom? Is freedom for everyone? In Necessary Fiction, Eloghosa Osunde poses these provocative questions and many more while exploring the paths and dreams, hopes and fears of more than two dozen characters who are staking out lives for themselves in contemporary Nigeria. As they work to establish themselves in the city’s lively worlds of art, music, entertainment, and creative commerce, we meet their collective and individual attempts to reckon with the necessary fiction they carry for survival.

A big-hearted novel of nostalgia and longing, and a poignant exploration of how we choose to love. A novel that speaks to unfulfilled desires and the euphoric nostalgia that’s particular to the beginning of middle age, The Other Wife is as heartfelt as it is daring in its deep reckoning with the past and quest for true joy.

Enka meets Mathilde in art school and is instantly drawn to her, desperate to keep her close. Enter SCAFFOLD. This cutting-edge technology could allow Enka to inhabit Mathilde’s mind and access her memories, artistic inspirations, and deep-seated trauma. Undergoing this procedure would link them forever. But at what cost? Blisteringly smart, thought-provoking, and shocking, Immaculate Conception offers us a portrait of close friendship — achingly tender and twisted — that captures the tenuous line between love and possession that will haunt you long after you turn the final page.

James Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love, set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris. With sharp probing insight, Giovanni’s Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde’s philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.

Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability.

In this heartrending, lyrical debut work of fiction, Fatimah Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. When We Were Sisters tenderly examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, names the perils of being three Muslim American girls alone against the world, and ultimately illustrates how those who’ve lost everything might still make homes in each other.

A coming-of-age comedy. A telenovela-worthy drama. A moving family saga. All in a phone call you won’t want to hang up on.

In National Book Award–winner Jacqueline Woodson’s novel, a 16-year-old girl named Melody stands at the threshold of womanhood on the staircase of her grandparents’ brownstone in Brooklyn. As the novel’s beginning unfolds, Melody confesses that she herself is “a narrative, someone’s almost forgotten story. Remembered.” With lyrical eloquence, Woodson tells the story of two families whose fates are stitched together by Melody’s birth. With every page, Red at the Bone envelops its reader within the luminous song of a masterful storyteller.

A woman who’s used to going solo discovers that there’s one relationship she can’t run away from in this “hilarious, electric” (The New York Times) novel, a probing examination of the complexities of family, queerness, race, and community. With its endearingly prickly narrator and a cast of characters willing to both challenge her and catch her when she falls, this novel is a clever, moving portrait of a woman and the relationships she thought she could live without.

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran’s debut poetry collection investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.

An acclaimed poet reclaims her origin story as the queer daughter of a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American visual artist in this groundbreaking memoir, combining lyrical prose, biting criticism, and haunting visuals.

A novel by a brilliant new voice, Hombrecito is a queer coming-of-age story about a young immigrant’s complex relationships with his mother and his motherland.

From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself — a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America.

From Marlon James, author of the bestselling National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the second book in the Dark Star trilogy. This time, Sogolon the Moon Witch takes center stage and gives her own account. Part adventure tale, part chronicle of an indomitable woman who bows to no man, it is a fascinating novel that explores power, personality, and the places where they overlap.

A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture — from Beyoncé to Game of Thrones — to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by migration and colonialism.

A funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you’re supposed to be, and the limits of love.