East Library's Nashville Reads Picks 2023

"In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to...

Middle school student Sam is comfortable with their nonbinary identity, and their family has accepted it too (as long as they do their homework and chores), so when their history teacher assigns as a project coming up with a proposal for the new statue honoring a historical Staten Islander (there is a contest involved) they and their friend TJ decide to focus on Alice Austen, a lesbian photographer, whose house on Staten Island is a museum--but they...

"Essentially this book is a heavily visual memoir-in-essays that explores how the experience of gestational parenthood-conceiving, birthing, and breastfeeding my son Samson-eventually clarified my gender identity and allowed me to project a different more masculine self. Ruminating on how the experiences contained under the umbrella of "motherhood" don't fully describe my experience amplifies the outsiderness the speaker, who is almost always addressing...

"Living life and finding love as an X-gender person in Japan. At 33 years old, Asuka Miyazaki realizes that they like women! Asuka, however, is neither a woman nor a man--instead, they're X-gender, (a non-binary identity). Follow Asuka through the pages of this autobiographical manga as they record the ins and outs of their journey to finding love with a woman.

"While young children are avid observers and questioners of their world, adults often shut down or postpone conversations on complicated topics because it's hard to know where to begin. Research shows that talking about issues like race and gender from the age of two not only helps children understand what they see, but also increases self-awareness, self-esteem, and allows them to recognize and confront things that are unfair, like discrimination...

The first openly trans person elected to a U.S. state legislature discusses her lonely and closeted childhood and how she re-wrote her own future by deciding to run for office.

Dark, irreverent, and truly innovative, the speculative stories in Homesick meditate on the theme of home and our estrangement from it, and what happens when the familiar suddenly shifts into the uncanny. In stories that foreground queer relationships and transgender or nonbinary characters, Cipri delivers the origin story for a superhero team comprised of murdered girls; a housecleaner discovering an impossible ocean in her least-favorite client's...

""This is our world. Like many things in nature it's round and holds everyone at the same time. This is the Gender Wheel. Like our world it's round and holds everyone at the same time too..." In 2010 Maya introduced the Gender Wheel and the Gender Team in the Gender Now Coloring Book. It was a jam-packed coloring extravaganza exploring bodies, nature and history in relation to multiple gender identities. It also opened up the possibility of play and...

"A queer, black teenager finds herself stranded in a dangerous and unfamiliar place: an all-white Christian youth backpacking camp"--Amazon.com.