Blog

A Celebration of Pride and LGBTQIA+ Stories

May 29, 2024

When I think of Pride Month in the Inland Northwest, I think about the wealth of LGBTQIA+ literature we have here in Spokane (scroll to the bottom for a full list of books mentioned in this blog, and also check out this blog post from Spokane writer and illustrator HF Brownfield).

Poet Kathryn Smith won the Jake Adam York Prize from Milkweed Press for her “lush and deathy” collection Self-Portrait with Cephalopod (I love the word ‘deathy’). Novelist Alexis M. Smith has won the nationally lauded Lambda Literary Award and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for her exquisite novel Marrow Island. Her breathtaking novel Glaciers was just reissued with a new cover by Tin House Books. Erin Pringle’s latest story collection, Unexpected Weather Events, is a wintry wonderland of emotion. Former Spokane Public School librarian Stephanie Oakes’s latest novel, The Meadows, is a deep dive into the horrors of conversion therapy and is one of the very best novels I read in 2023. Local queer columnist Kiantha Duncan publishes advice in The Spokesman Review, where she has urged readers to “Cancel fear and focus on inclusivity,” a message all of us need to carefully and thoughtfully absorb.

There is an abundance of wealth, too, in the greater Northwest literary scene. Richard Fifield’s The Flood Girls—set in a tiny town in Northern Montana—saved my life when I was getting sober. Nicola Griffith’s So Lucky—about multiple sclerosis and the monster of ableism—helped me handle a particularly grueling MS relapse of my own (Griffith is known worldwide, too, for her meaty queer Arthurian novels, Hild and Menewood). Megan Kruse’s Call Me Home explores themes of abuse, family, and home with wondrous complexity—no wonder Kruse was a National Book Award Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree.

And there’s more from these Seattle writers: Luther Hughes’s beautiful new poetry collection, A Shiver in the Leaves, which “wrestles with the interior and exterior symbiosis of a gay Black man finding refuge from the threat of depression and death in love and desire.” Corinne Manning’s story collection We Had No Rules, has been called “weird, scary, hilarious, hot, and revelatory” (Melissa Febos). Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s widely praised new memoir Touching the Art, in part about the writer’s relationship to a grandmother that, as Sycamore says in an interview on Shondaland, initially nourished but then disparaged her for, “everything that made me different—my femininity, my introspection, my creativity, my empathy…everything that made me queer and femme.” Putsata Reang’s memoir, Ma and Me, also discusses the complexity and pain carried within both individual and familial bodies, centering the experience of refugees. All four of these fantastic writers are based in Seattle, and Reang has Spokane ties, too, and was once a reporter for The Spokesman.

And for those who love teen/ya literature, check out non-binary writer Candice “Cam” Montgomery, whose novels include Home and Away and By Any Means Necessary. My 11-year-old daughter loved the anthology Transmogrify!, which features Montgomery’s work.

Our current Washington State Poet Laureate, Arianne True (Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations), is currently editing an anthology of queer poetry by WA State writers. I love the work True is doing to amplify a platform for queer voices. Follow Arianne True on the ArtsWA website.

There have always been queer people, queer communities, and exceptional queer artists. The books I’ve mentioned here are only a small sampling of the LGBTQIA+ writing we’re lucky enough to engage with in our region.

While some of these books are on order and still making their way into our catalog, you can pick up copies at local indie bookstores Aunties Bookstore or Wishing Tree Books at any time!