Books to Celebrate in June 2025 https://ift.tt/zUVL82M
Happy Pride, y’all! I hope you’re celebrating and finding joy and community this month, but also taking a hard look at the world around us. I hope you’re getting involved and fighting for a better world in whatever ways feel right to you.
I believe reading can be rest, resistance, and celebration all at once, so if you’re looking to add to your Pride month activities, here’s a non-exhaustive list of queer Southern books published in the first half of 2025.
Despite the way the South is often described, members of the LGBTQIA+ community have always been part of the fabric of our region, part of what makes us who we are. These books collectively resist a one-dimensional view of the South and its people, and look to a vibrant, inclusive future.
Button Poetry: “Through multilayered language and immersive imagery, SaintDenisSanchez interweaves political and social issues-from the lasting impacts of colonialism to environmental disaster-with intensely personal narratives of love, learning, and loss. The long, lyrical form and enrapturing poetic voice draw you in and refuse to let you go.”
Hanover Square Press: “The beloved author of Don’t Cry for Me and Perfect Peace returns with a poignant, emotionally exuberant novel about a young queer Black man finding his voice in 1980s Chicago — a novel of family, forgiveness and perseverance.”
W.W. Norton: “In Take My Name but Say It Slow, Dai writes of a river that runs only in the mind and a queer map housed on the internet; of love carved on the rocks of Taipei and Arizona; of pounding the racetrack in Wenzhou, watching his grandfather fade from the world. Incisive and gorgeously written, Take My Name but Say It Slow offers a fresh perspective on placelessness, yearning, and belonging, and introduces a sparkling new literary talent.”
SUNY Press: “Snapping Beans offers a collective narrative of Southern queer lesbian women and gender-nonconforming persons. Throughout the text, the American South acts as both a region and a main character, one that can shame and condemn but also serve as a site of reconciliation.”
Crown: “Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach.”
Four Way Books: “The richly saturated subjects of No Small Thing range from pastoral youth, ancestral tenements, and remembered ghettos to the revival tent, child preachers, and the word-encrusted performances of the grown but still enchanted poet.”
Doubleday: “In her heartfelt, shimmering rockabilly ode to a place in a permanent state of becoming, Callie Collins captures the roughhousing mood and paradoxical longings of the American psyche. Just inside the doors of the Rush Creek Saloon, the old smacks into the new — and the messy desire for a good time at any cost bucks up against the profound need to belong.”
Beacon Press: “W. J. Lofton writes vivid, accessible poems that channel the energy, urgency, ambitions, joys, and sorrows of a young Black queer artist. They are about love and flirtation, sweet tea and hot sauce, God and family, life and death, police brutality and extrajudicial killings.”
University Press of Kentucky: “To Belong Here delves into how queer, trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian people make sense of life in the mountains. Featuring contributors whose identities across race, gender, and socioeconomic background make for a uniquely intersectional look at the area, this collection provides a nuanced understanding of Appalachia and what it means to represent it. A collective exploration of rejection and acceptance, To Belong Here calls for a more inclusive future in Appalachia — one where everyone can thrive.”
Nightboat Books: “Unsex Me Here is a prayer book tied together by the strings of a corset. Glamorous ramblers, haunted by the sense of another world drawing near, wander in and out of its inexplicable twilight… Heartbreak is not so far from rapture; holy babble is another kind of gossip. Every pilgrimage is as dense with symbolism as it is refined by desire.”
Flatiron Books: “The newly nameless narrator of Make Sure You Die Screaming has rejected the gender binary, has flamed out with a vengeance at their corporate gig, is most likely brain damaged from a major tussle with their now ex-boyfriend, and is on a bender to end all benders… An unflinching interrogation of class rage, economic (im)mobility, gender expression, and the rot at the heart of capitalism, Make Sure You Die Screaming is the loud, funny, tragic, suspenseful road trip novel of our times.”
Simon & Schuster: “In this powerful debut reminiscent of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, two men in Atlanta reconcile their human dignity against the price of their professional ambitions working for a real estate development company displacing Black residents in preparation for the 1996 Olympics.”
Delacorte Press: “When the mayor of a small Alabama town starts targeting Pride events, bad boy Zeke begins hosting a series of ‘Pride Speakeasies’ in this joyful queer coming-of-age!”
University Press of Mississippi: “Rainbow Fleur de Lis: Essays on Queer New Orleans History is an anthology of eighty-five short, easy-to-read essays that originally appeared in Ambush Magazine and French Quarter Journal. Altogether, these essays provide an invaluable resource on New Orleans LGBTQ+ history.”
Tiny Reparations Books: “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 artist: 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.”
Dan in Green Gables
By Rey Terciero, Illustrated by Claudia Aguirre
June 3, 2025
Penguin Workshop: “A new retelling of Anne of Green Gables about unconventional families, queer identity, and finding the meaning of home in the most unlikely of places.”
Catapult: “A propulsive character study of a flawed and fascinating artist, Songs of No Provenance explores issues of trans nonbinary identity, queer baiting and appropriation, kink, fame hunger, secrecy and survival, and the question of whether a work of art can exist separately from its artist.”
Be Gay, Do Crimes
Edited by Molly Llewellyn & Kristel Buckley
June 3, 2025
Dzanc Books: “In sixteen brilliant, wild-eyed stories, Be Gay, Do Crime delivers a celebration and reckoning of why queer people turn to crime-unintentionally, as a means of survival, as protest, as rescue, or to right injustices big and small.”
University of Virginia Press: “Queer Virginia is a long-needed record of the courageous and creative ways that LGBTQ+ people across the commonwealth have persevered and fought for their rights. Full of poignant and telling glimpses of LGBTQ+ life through the decades, this volume reveals generations of widespread prejudice and oppressive laws and the inspiring resilience that queer Virginians brought to this struggle.”
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