Cleis Press is an American independent publisher of books in the areas of sexuality, erotica, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, fiction, and human rights. The press was founded in 1980 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It later moved to San Francisco and was based out of Berkeley until its purchase by Start Media in 2014. Its founders were Frédérique Delacoste, Felice Newman and Mary Winfrey Trautmann, who collectively financed, wrote and published the press's first book Fight Back: Feminist Resistance to Male Violence in 1981. In 1987, they published Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry by Delacoste with Priscilla Alexander.
Daphne Gottlieb is a San Francisco-based performance poet.
Vivek Shraya is a Canadian musician, writer, and visual artist. She is a seven-time Lambda Literary Award finalist and is considered a Great Canadian Filmmaker of the Future by CBC Arts.
Lambda Literary Awards are awarded yearly by the United States–based Lambda Literary Foundation to published works that celebrate or explore LGBTQ themes. The awards are presented annually for books published in the previous year. The Lambda Literary Foundation states that its mission is "to celebrate LGBT literature and provide resources for writers, readers, booksellers, publishers, and librarians—the whole literary community."
Arsenal Pulp Press is a Canadian independent book publishing company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. The company publishes a broad range of titles in both fiction and non-fiction, focusing primarily on underrepresented genres such as underground literature, LGBT literature, multiracial literature, graphic novels, visual arts, progressive and activist non-fiction and works in translation, and is noted for founding the annual Three-Day Novel Contest.
Ivan E. Coyote is a Canadian spoken word performer, writer, and LGBT advocate. Coyote has won many accolades for their collections of short stories, novels, and films. They also visit schools to tell stories and give writing workshops. The CBC has called Coyote a "gender-bending author who loves telling stories and performing in front of a live audience." Coyote is non-binary and uses singular they pronouns. Many of Coyote's stories are about gender, identity, and social justice. Coyote currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Ashley Little is a Canadian author of both adult and young adult literature.
Casey Plett is a Canadian writer, best known for her novel Little Fish, her Lambda Literary Award winning short story collection, A Safe Girl to Love, and her Giller Prize-nominated short story collection, A Dream of a Woman. Plett is a transgender woman, and she often centers this experience in her writing.
Nevada: A Novel is the debut novel from author Imogen Binnie, released by Topside Press in 2013. Nevada follows the story of Maria Griffiths, a trans woman living in Brooklyn, who embarks on a road trip headed towards the West Coast where she meets James, a Walmart employee questioning his gender. The novel was not an initial success, but gained an online following and was reissued in 2022. In the years following its release, it has been credited by literary critic Stephanie Burt as having starting a transgender literary movement and inspiring authors such as Torrey Peters and Casey Plett.
Sub Rosa is a 2010 queer novel by Canadian Amber Dawn published by Vancouver-based Arsenal Pulp Press. The novel was Dawn's debut novel, and is a work of speculative fiction that touches on topics of sex, work, imagination, and survival. It narrates the story of "Little," a teenage girl who cannot remember her real name and ends up involved in the dark world of Sub Rosa, "a fantastical underground community of sex workers", where she enters the company of ghosts, magicians, and magical Glories. Sub Rosa won the Lambda Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction in 2011.
Kai Cheng Thom is a Canadian writer and former social worker. Thom, a non-binary trans woman, has published four books, including the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir (2016), the poetry collection a place called No Homeland (2017), a children's book, From the Stars in The Sky to the Fish in the Sea (2017), and I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World (2019), a book of essays centered on transformative justice.
Meredith Russo is an American young adult author from Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Marriage of a Thousand Lies is a novel by Sri Lankan-American author SJ Sindu, published by Soho Press in 2017. It tells the story of Lucky and Kris, two gay South Asian-Americans whose parents immigrated from Sri Lanka, who marry to stay in the closet.
Joshua Whitehead is a Canadian First Nations, two spirit poet and novelist.
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out is a 2014 book written by American author Susan Kuklin. For the book, Kuklin met and interviewed six transgender or gender-neutral young adults, describing their sense of identity before, during, and after transitioning.
Chana Porter is an American playwright, novelist, and education activist. Her debut novel, The Seep, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction.
Thomas Page McBee is an American transgender journalist, television writer, and amateur boxer. He was the first transgender man to box in Madison Square Garden, which he discusses in Amateur. His first book, Man Alive, won a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.
Topside Press was an independent publisher of trans and feminist literature based in Brooklyn, New York that operated from 2011 to 2017. The press published fiction, memoirs, short story collections, poetry, and non-fiction by trans authors, for trans readers, and about trans characters. It is often credited as an important contributor to the "trans literary renaissance."
God's Children Are Little Broken Things was a short story collection written by Nigerian author Arinze Ifeakandu and published by A Public Space in 2022. It provides nine distinct "stories about the joys and tribulations of queer love in contemporary Nigeria".
