Reader's Place: June 2019
I Can’t Date Jesus
I can't date Jesus by Michael Arceneaux, 2018. BIOG Arceneaux
A timely collection of alternately hysterical and soul-searching essays about what it is like to grow up as a creative, sensitive black man in a world that constantly tries to deride and diminish your humanity. With the characteristic wit and candor that have made him one of today's boldest writers on social issues, I Can't Date Jesus is Michael Arceneaux's impassioned, forthright, and refreshing look at minority life in today's America.
Trans Figured
Trans figured: my journey from boy to girl to woman to man, by Brian Belovitch,2018. BIOG Belovitch
Brian has had the rare distinction of coming out three times: first as a queer teenager; then as a glamorous transgender woman named Tish, and later, Natalia Gervais; and finally as an HIV-positive gay man surviving the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
Willa & Hesper
Willa & Hesper, by Amy Feltman, 2019. FIC Feltman
Willa and Hesper are MFA candidates in a fiction-writing program at Columbia. Willa is an only child from a New Jersey suburb immediately outside New York City, and Hesper is the dramatic youngest child of her Marin County-based family. Their union is fast and intense, lasting only seven months but leaving both women irrevocably changed.
Sugar Run
Sugar run, by Mesha Maren, 2018. FIC Maren
Jodi McCarty is seventeen when she's sentenced to life in prison for manslaughter. She's released eighteen years later heads south in search of someone she left behind. There, she will meet and fall in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother living in a motel room with her children. Together they head toward what they hope will be a new home and fresh start--but what do you do with a town and a family that refuses to change?
Sissy
Sissy: a coming-of-gender story, by Jacob Tobia, 2019. BIOG Tobia
A heart-wrenching, eye-opening, and giggle-inducing memoir about what it's like to grow up not sure if you're (a) a boy, (b) a girl, (c) something in between, or (d) all of the above.
The Bold World
The bold world: a memoir of family and transformation, by Jodie Patterson, 2019 BIOG Patterson
Jodie Patterson isthe mother of five children, including her ten-year-old transgender son Penelope, the catalyst for the author's reexamination of identity within her own dynamic household--and the wider world. This inspiring and highly personal debut memoir goes on to examine Jodie's extended families' African American experiences with racism and civil rights, and her own coming of age in New York City in the 1970s and 80.
Compiled by Ina Rimpau