76 Notable Debuts by Trans, Nonbinary, and Gender Non-Conforming Authors in 2024

This is the fifth time I’ve compiled this list. I don’t remember my motivations back in 2020. Perhaps I wanted to be a good, cis ally and honor authors I admire. Maybe I wanted to fill an end-of-the-year roundup call from wonderful CHIRB editors. Or, possibly, I wanted to highlight underrepresented voices. Perhaps. Maybe. Possibly. Whatever the reason, as I built that list of 18 authors after enduring months of COVID-19’s total isolation, I felt my whole world shift. It cracked me open. I finally put words to what I’ve felt for so, so long: I’m genderqueer; nonbinary. And in the wake of those thoughts, I felt above all else, terrified. I didn’t know what it meant for me, only that it was true. Inevitable. Undeniable. Real. 

That year, Biden’s presidency was only a month away. I felt hopeful, and like history was righting itself after a horrific, hateful departure. This year, for the first time, I write this as Trump’s second presidency is only a month away. So, yes, this year feels different. This year is different. I am terrified again, and if you’re reading this, I don’t think I have to explain why. 

For the first time in five years, I wondered if this list should exist at all. I saw trans authors on BlueSky cautioning against such lists, warning that something like this could be ammunition thrown like candy to those who want to censor us, ban us, or erase us. I cried through Wicked (I know, I know), as I texted my friends and group chats and asked their opinions. Is this safe? Is this wise? There’s no right answer. I’m still scared. For me. For the authors I admire. For the debut writers below full of creativity, hope, and fervor, telling their vital stories, putting themselves on the line. 

Our fear is warranted, and I understand and respect anyone who has to choose safety and privacy at this time. But I still believe in books, and I will always believe in us—this worldwide, beautiful, precious community. I know first-hand that books can save lives, and so, this list still exists. But, yes, this year is different. For the first time, I reached out to every author below (plus others) to ensure they felt safe and comfortable being included.* I told them I will edit them out in the future if they need it. I’m scared. I’m proud. 76 debut authors. Thank goodness.

*If you’re on this list and my message to you went to spam or you didn’t get it, and you’d like to be removed, please contact me through my website jenstjude.com and I’ll take care of it as soon as possible. If you’re on a past years’ list and would like to be removed, please also contact me. 

Adult Fiction

A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest
By Charlie J. Stephens
Torrey House Press

In 1980’s Oregon, Smokey is figuring out how to survive childhood with a young mom who is increasingly desperate in her search for love. As their mother’s boyfriends come and go, Smokey aches for the comfort and safety their mother can never quite provide. When a dangerous new man moves into the house, Smokey seeks refuge in the nearby forests—finding comfort as they give themselves over to the strength and beauty of the natural world.

All Things Seen and Unseen
By RJ McDaniel
ECW Press

Alex Nguyen is an isolated, chronically ill university student in her early 20s. After a suicide attempt and subsequent lengthy hospitalization, she finds herself without a job, kicked out of campus housing, unable to afford school, and still struggling in the aftermath of a relationship’s dissolution. Hope comes in the form of a rich high school friend who offers Alex a job housesitting at her family’s empty summer mansion on a gulf island. Surrounded by dense forest and ocean, Alex must try to survive as an outsider in a remote, insular community; to navigate the beginnings of a possible romance; and to live through the trauma she has repressed to survive, even as the memories—and a series of increasingly unnerving events—threaten to pull her back under the surface.

Bad Habit
By Alana S. Potero
Harpervia

Raised in an animated yet impoverished blue-collar neighborhood, Alana S. Portero’s protagonist struggles to find her place. As the city around her changes–the heroin epidemic that ravages Madrid through the ’80s and ’90s, rallying calls of worker solidarity and the pulsing beat of the city’s night scene– she becomes increasingly detached from the world and, most crucially, herself. Yet through her eyes, the streets and people of Madrid are illuminated by a poetry absent from everyday life. As she forges ahead, she sets her compass to a personal north star: endeavoring to find herself.

Bad Seed 
By Gabriel Carle
Translated from the Spanish by Heather Houde
The Feminist Press

The visceral, wildly imaginative stories in Bad Seed flick through working-class scenes of contemporary Puerto Rico, where friends and lovers melt into and defy their surroundings—night clubs, ruined streets, cramped rooms with cockroaches moving in the walls. A horny high schooler spends his summer break in front of the TV; a queer love triangle unravels on the emblematic theater steps of the University of Puerto Rico; a group of friends get high and watch San Juan burn from atop a clocktower; an HIV positive college student works the night shift at a local bathhouse. At turns playful and heartbreaking, Bad Seed is the long overdue English-language debut of one of Puerto Rico’s most exciting up-and-coming writers.

The Cure for Drowning
By Loghan Paylor
Random House of Canada

Born Kathleen to an immigrant Irish farming family in southern Ontario, Kit McNair has been a troublesome changeling since, at ten, they fell through the river ice and drowned—only to be nursed back to life by their mother’s Celtic magic. A daredevil in boy’s clothes, Kit chafes at every aspect of a farmgirl’s life, driving that same mother to distraction with worry about where Kit will ever fit in. When Rebekah Kromer, an elegant German-Canadian doctor’s daughter, moves to town with her parents in April 1939, Rebekah has no doubt as to who 19-year-old Kit is. Soon she and Kit, and Kit’s older brother, Landon, are drawn tight in a love triangle that will tear them and their families apart, and send each of them off on a separate path to war.

The Default World
By Naomi Kanakia
Amethyst Editions

Years after fleeing San Francisco and getting sober, Jhanvi has made a life for herself working at a grocery co-op and saving for her surgeries. But when her friend (and sometimes more) Henry mentions that he and his techie festival-goer friends spent $100,000 to transform a warehouse basement into a sex dungeon, Jhanvi starts wondering if there’s a way to exploit these gullible idiots. She returns to San Francisco, hatching a plan to marry Henry for his company’s generous healthcare benefits.

Dulhaniyaa
By Talia Bhatt
Self-published 

Esha Arora is the last person anyone would have expected to acquiesce to an arranged marriage. Outspoken, opinionated and forward-thinking, she has made her thoughts on these archaic institutions known to anyone who’d lend her an ear. To her traditional family’s surprise and joy, however, when a good rishta for her hand comes along, Esha agrees to abruptly quit her MFA program in the States and returns to India to be wed. That’s when Billu, a cyclone in a salwar and dance instructor extraordinaire, bursts into the dull monotony of Esha’s pre-wedding existence. To her shock and delight, Esha finds herself enjoying her lessons with Billu, in addition to every other moment with her that she finds herself trying to steal away.

The Familialists
By TT. Madden
Off Limits Press LLC

Sorrel follows the calls for help from her ex, Mau,d to Trinity Springs, an uncanny Americana neighborhood that she cannot find any record of actually existing. A place that defies the laws of physics. A place of eerily smiling faces, white-picket fences, and manicured lawns. A place where she, and only she, is warned not to go outside after sundown. To free Maud from the grip of the town, and to escape a personal and terrifying subjugation, Sorrel must face a monster out of America’s past, and the people who are helping that monster claw its way back to the present.

Hombrecito
By Santiago Jose Sanchez
Riverhead Books

In this groundbreaking novel, Santiago Jose Sanchez plunges us into the heart of one boy’s life. His mother takes him and his brother from Colombia to America, leaving their absent father behind but essentially disappearing herself once they get to Miami. In America, his mother works as a waitress when she was once a doctor. The boy embraces his queer identity as wholeheartedly as he embraces his new home, but not without a sense of loss. As he grows, his relationship with his mother becomes fraught, tangled, a love so intense that it borders on vivid pain but is also the axis around which his every decision revolves.

Home Ice
By Olivia Lynd
Self-published 

After her father’s death, Lily finds herself back in the hometown she swore she’d never return to—and the painful memories it holds. The plan is to focus on her new job as an assistant athletic trainer for the Salt Lake City Sting ice hockey team. Not part of the plan? Falling for the team’s sexy goalie—who happens to be her next door neighbor. Home Ice is a spicy, funny—sometimes angsty—standalone professional hockey romance featuring a transgender heroine and her way-too-hot hockey goalie neighbor.

In a Flash
By Kris Rugg
Knapsack Romance Press

In an effort to escape her toxic ex, Mae Mack breaks out of her daily grind and sets off on her first trip out of Maine and into the heart of Grand Canyon’s backcountry. On her first day out, she is reconnected with Ranger Kes Wylde, a woman she met at a wedding years earlier. Reunited, Mae and Kes are forced to confront their deep feelings for each other. Will they choose vulnerability in the face of self-doubt, the fear of heartbreak, and the threat of mother nature?

In Universes
By Emet North
Harper

Raffi works in an observational cosmology lab, searching for dark matter and trying to hide how little they understand their own research. Every chance they get, they escape to see Britt, a queer sculptor who fascinates them for reasons they also don’t—or won’t—understand. As Raffi’s carefully constructed life begins to collapse, they become increasingly fixated on the multiverse and the idea that somewhere, there might be a universe where they mean as much to Britt as she does to them…and just like that, Raffi and Britt are thirteen years old, best friends and maybe something more.

The Key
By Jo Morgan Sloan
Midnight Meadow Publishing

Two high school sweethearts—one cisgender, one transgender, both men—find each other again in adulthood and have a second chance at love, but one of them doesn’t know they’ve been in love before.

Kitten
By Olive Nuttall
Te Herenga Waka University Press

Rosemary, a trans girl, has many conflicting qualities. She’s super smart but flawed, polyamorous but timid, promiscuous but inexperienced. She’s surprising, and surprised by herself. A call that Rosemary’s grandmother is dying puts her on the bus from Te Whanganui-a-Tara back to Kirikiriroa. There, with her mother, half-sister, and other family and friends, she remembers the damage of her past. And then Thorn—Rosemary’s long-distance daddy—shows up. Often wildly funny, and with a tender, matter-of-fact closeness to the enigmatic Rosemary.

The Library Thief 
By Kuchenga Shenjé
Hanover Square Press

1896. After he brought her home from Jamaica as a baby, Florence’s father had her hair hot-combed to make her look like the other girls. But as a young woman, Florence is not so easy to tame—and when she brings scandal to his door, the bookbinder throws her onto the streets of Manchester. Intercepting her father’s latest commission, Florence talks her way into the remote, forbidding Rose Hall to restore its collection of rare books. Lord Francis Belfield’s library is old and full of secrets—but none so intriguing as the whispers about his late wife.Then one night, the library is broken into. Strangely, all the priceless tomes remain untouched, but Florence discovers a half-burned book in the fireplace. She realizes with horror that someone has found and set fire to the secret diary of Lord Belfield’s wife–which may hold the clue to her fate.

Lightborne
By Hesse Phillips
Pegasus Books

Christopher Marlowe: playwright, poet, lover. In the plague-stricken streets of Elizabethan England, Kit flirts with danger, leaving a trail of enemies and old flames in his wake. His plays are a roaring success, but in the spring of 1593, the queen’s eyes are everywhere and the air is laced with paranoia. Marlowe receives an unwelcome visit from his one-time mentor, Richard Baines, a man who knows all of Marlowe’s secrets and is hell-bent on his destruction. When Marlowe is arrested on charges of treason, heresy, and sodomy—all of which are punishable by death—he is released on bail with the help of Sir Thomas Walsingham. Kit presumes Walsingham to be his friend; in fact, the spymaster has hired an assassin to take care of Kit, fearing that his own sins may come to light.

Lord of the Empty Isles
By Jules Arbeaux
Hodderscape

Five years ago, interstellar pirate Idrian Delaciel ordered a withering—a death curse—cast on Remy’s brother, costing him his life. Now, Remy is ready to return the favour. Only when he casts the withering, it also rebounds onto him. The implications are unthinkable—that Remy is fatebound to his brother’s killer. The only way to slow the curse is to close the distance between them, so Remy infiltrates Idrian’s criminal crew, hiding his identity as the witherer. But Remy quickly learns that Idrian is the sole provider of life-saving supplies to thousands of innocents. And if he dies, they will perish with him.

Love the World or Get Killed Trying
By Alvina Chamberland
Noemi Press

Through playful poetic prose, sharp social commentary and self-deprecating gallows humor Love the World or Get Killed Trying dives into the mind of Alvina, a trans woman on the eve of turning 30. The reader is invited to follow her journey through the breathtaking wilderness of Iceland and busy city boulevards of Berlin and Paris as she probes questions of eternity, sexuality, longing, death, love, and how hard it is to remain soft when you’re a ceaseless target of straight men’s secret lust and open disgust.

Love/Aggression
By June Martin
Traum Books

Best friends Lily and Zoe fight, separate, reunite, and repeat, each time deepening the belief that the other is the source of their problems. If Lily can’t give up her desire for control, if Zoe can’t lay aside her cruelty and ego, they’ll never escape their intolerable places in the world. Traversing art, domination, sex, and shape-shifting houses, LOVE/AGGRESSION is a novel about the indignity of depending on other people, and the terrible cost of trying not to.

Mistress of Lies
By K.M. Enright
Orbit 

The daughter of a powerful but disgraced Blood Worker, Shan LeC laire has spent her entire life perfecting her blood magic, building her network of spies, and gathering every scrap of power she could. Now, to protect her brother, she assassinates their father and takes her place at the head of the family. And that is only the start of her revenge. Samuel Hutchinson is a bastard with a terrible gift. When he stumbles upon the first victim of a magical serial killer, he’s drawn into the world of magic and intrigue he’s worked so hard to avoid—and is pulled deeply into the ravenous and bloodthirsty court of the vampire king.

Moon Dust in My Hairnet
By J.R. Creadon
Mythic Roads Press

20-year-old Lane was perfectly happy living in her big sister’s shadow. The great Faraday Tanner, who invented the gravdrive and inspired the movement to found the moon’s first independent colony, was the unequaled voice of the post-melt generation. That is, until an unimaginable tragedy cut Faraday’s legacy short. Wracked with survivor’s guilt, Lane embraces her job on the moon: lunch lady—which is more than her parents think she can handle. Lane tries to put the past behind her, committed to enjoying her kitchen work and dating her boyfriend and their new crushes. But when colony goods go missing and vital equipment gets tampered with, Lane must band together with new and old friends to find the culprit and save her sister’s dream.

The Portent Solution
By Ashley Nova
Spectrum Books 

Charlotte Price is a mess; perpetually tardy, chronically unfocused, and indecisive to a fault. She’d hoped that apprenticing for London’s only master alchemist and private detective would help solve her problems, but her first investigation will test her limits in ways she never imagined. On the trail of a dangerous magical drug, Charlotte’s mentor vanishes without a trace, Lost, overwhelmed, and inexperienced, she must use everything she’s learned, and improvise the things she hasn’t, as she takes on magically empowered assassins, gate-crashes a society ball, and uncovers a conspiracy that goes right to the heart of government.

The Prospects 
By KT Hoffman
Dial Press 

Hope is familiar territory for Gene Ionescu. He has always loved baseball, a sport made for underdogs and optimists like him. He also loves his team, the minor league Beaverton Beavers, and, for the most part, he loves the career he’s built. As the first openly trans player in professional baseball, Gene has nearly everything he’s ever let himself dream of—that is, until Luis Estrada, Gene’s former teammate and current rival, gets traded to the Beavers, destroying the careful equilibrium of Gene’s life. Gene and Luis can’t manage a civil conversation off the field or a competent play on it, but in the close confines of dugout benches and roadie buses, they begrudgingly rediscover a comfortable rhythm.

The Revenge of Captain Vessia
By Leslie Allen
Self-Published

Claire Vessia’s been sentenced to death. The last survivor of a ship of would-be-pirates captured by the navy, she’s been accused of all of their crimes. She will die for it. Determined to go out with her head held high, her plans for a stoic execution are thrown out the window when a highborn lady offers her a chance to escape the noose…if she pays in vials of her own blood. But she is betrayed. Hung from the gallows and buried at sea, she rises amidst the waves as a Vampyri, an undead monster. Without a clue of where, or even what she is, and only a terrible hunger to guide her, it’s only when she consumes a person trying to help her that she begins to understands what’s been done to her.

Rules for Ghosting
By Shelly Jay Shore
Dell

Ezra Friedman sees ghosts, which made growing up in a funeral home complicated. It might have been easier if his grandfather’s ghost didn’t give him scathing looks of disapproval as he went through a second, HRT-induced puberty, or if he didn’t have the pressure of all those relatives–living and dead–judging every choice he makes. It’s no wonder that Ezra runs as far away from the family business as humanly possible. But when the floor of his dream job drops out from under him and his mother uses the family Passover seder to tell everyone she’s running off with the rabbi’s wife, Ezra finds himself back in the thick of it. With his parents’ marriage imploding and the Friedman Family Memorial Chapel on the brink of financial ruin, Ezra agrees to step into his mother’s shoes and help out…which means long days surrounded by ghosts that no one else can see.

Sargassa
By Sophie Burnham
Daw Books

The role of Imperial Historian is Selah Kelios’s birthright, but she was supposed to have more time to learn the role from her father, the previous Historian. In the wake of her father’s shocking assassination, Selah finds herself custodian of more than just the Imperial Archives when an old flame returns intending to steal the Iveroa Stone—a seemingly harmless artifact containing secrets that could destroy the empire. Theo Nix is a damn good spy, and they know it. By day, they work in Senator Naevia Kleios’s office; smart, unobtrusive, and grateful, they’re the model of a perfect plebeian. By night, their time belongs to Griff: master strategist, commander of the Revenants, the spider at the center of a very large and very dangerous web. When Griff gives Theo an assignment, they move, no questions asked, so it’s really no surprise Theo is flirting with Arran Alexander—Selah’s low-caste half brother is an obvious target. It is a surprise, however, that they’re enjoying it so much.

Smothermoss
By Alisa Alering
Tin House Books

In 1980s Appalachia, sisters Sheila and Angie couldn’t be more different. While their mother works long shifts at the nearby asylum, Sheila cares for their home and keeps to herself, even when enduring relentless bullying. Her fearless younger sister, Angie, is more focused on fighting imaginary zombies and creating tarot-like cards that seem to have minds of their own. When the brutal murder of two female hikers on the nearby Appalachian Trail stuns their small community, the sisters find themselves tangled in a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

Still Life
By Katherine Packert Burke
W. W. Norton & Company

Everything in Edith’s life is approaching disaster. Her writing career is stagnant. Her love life is a mess. Her ex, Tessa, is marrying a man. Her teeth are rotting in her skull. And her best friend, Val, is dead. Still Life volleys between the present and recent past, chronicling the lives of three women—one cis, two trans, all forever entwined. Edith was a bumbling “boy” pre-transition, in love with Tessa, enamored by Val, and drowning in Boston. She and Tessa called each other Joni and Joan, an homage to the musical backdrop of their fledgling adulthood. When Edith decides to leave behind the East Coast for graduate school, she begins a yearslong journey away from the person she loves most and toward a hazy new understanding of who she will become.

Sundered Moon
By Fae’Rynn
Self Published

The galaxy is a dark and deadly place, run by vicious corporate empires. Only Central, a nation that rose three hundred years ago after violent insurrection, remains as a beacon of hope and equity to all who reside in their borders. Dia, a young mech pilot from Central, has infiltrated the upper echelons of the Fomorian Armory, an empire that prides themselves on their exceptional pilots and otherworldly weapons. It’s a dangerous game she must play—bringing down an empire—especially after becoming an unlikely ally with the imperial princess, a woman hellbent on gaining her own freedom.

Sundown in San Ojeula
By M.M Olivas
Lanternfish Press

When the death of her aunt brings Liz Remolina back to San Ojuela, the prospect fills her with dread. The isolated desert town was the site of a harrowing childhood accident that left her clairvoyant, the companion of wraiths and ghosts. Yet it may also hold the secret to making peace with a dark family history and a complicated personal and cultural identity. Setting out on the train with her younger sister Mary in tow, she soon finds herself hemmed in by a desolate landscape where monsters and ancient gods stalk the night. She’s relieved at first to find that her childhood best friend Julian still lives in San Ojuela, but soon realizes that he too is changed.

These Fragile Graces
By Izzy Wasserstein
Tachyon Publications

In mid-21st-century Kansas City, Dora hasn’t been back to her old commune in years. But when Dora’s ex-girlfriend Kay is killed, and everyone at the commune is a potential suspect, Dora knows she’s the only person who can solve the murder. As Dora is dragged back into her old community and begins her investigations, she discovers that Kay’s death is only one of several terrible incidents. A strange new drug is circulating. People are disappearing. And Dora is being attacked by assailants from her pre-transition past.

The Transitive Properties of Cheese
By Ann LeBlanc
Neon Hemlock Press

Millions Wayland was cutting the curds when she learned someone had thrown her cheese cave into the sun. To find out who is responsible, Millions makes a copy of her digitally uploaded consciousness and transmits it to a nearby orbital city. Soon enough, she becomes entangled in a messy conflict between several copies of herself that she made decades ago, one that soon ferments into a situation ready to go off.

Welcome to Dorley Hall
By Alyson Greaves
Neem Tree Presses

Mark Vogel is like the older brother Stefan never had, but one day he disappears without a trace. A year later, after encountering a woman who looks near-identical to Mark, Stefan becomes obsessed. He finds that dozens of young men have disappeared over the years, many of them students at the Royal College of Saint Almsworth, and most of them troubled or unruly. Why are students going missing? Who are these women who bear striking resemblances to them? And what is their connection to the selective student accommodation on the edge of campus, Dorley Hall?

What Grows in the Dark
By Jaq Evans
Mira Books

Sixteen years ago, Brigit Weylan’s older sister, Emma, walked into the woods in their small hometown of Ellis Creek. She never walked out. People said she was troubled—in the months leading up to her death, she was convinced there was a monster in those trees. Marked by the tragedy, Brigit left town and never looked back. Now Brigit travels around the country investigating paranormal activity (and faking the results) with her cameraman, Ian. But when she receives a call from Ellis Creek, she’s thrust into the middle of a search for two missing teenagers. As Brigit and Ian are drawn further into the case, the parallels to Emma’s death become undeniable. And worse, Brigit can’t explain what’s happening to her: trees appearing in her bedroom in the middle of the night, something with a very familiar laugh watching her out in the darkness, and Emma’s voice on her phone, reminding Brigit to finish what they started.

Women’s Hotel
By Daniel M. Lavery
HarperVia

The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There’s Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There’s Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there’s Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student. The residents give up breakfast, juggle competing jobs at rival presses, abandon their children, get laid off from the telephone company, attempt to retrain as stenographers, all with the shared awareness that their days as an institution are numbered, and they’d better make the most of it while it lasts.

Yr Dead
By Sam Sax
McSweeney’s

In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezra’s ever loved, every place they’ve felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place, reveals itself in an instant. Unfolding in fragments of memory, Ezra dissolves into the family, religion, desire, losses, pains and joys that made them into the person that’s decided on this final act of protest.

Non-Fiction 

Crossdresser // Accept Yourself or Die 
By Kat Rogue // Imogen Reid 
Sheer Spite Press 

The books are published back-to-back for a double gut-punch of heartfelt, angry, and funny reflections on transfemme coming of age. Imogen Reid’s Accept Yourself Or Die: From Mormon Missionary to Trans Punk travels from small-town Northern Ontario, to the Missionary Training Centre in Provo, Utah, to basement shows in Ottawa. It’s a story about staying stubbornly human in a world that wants to destroy you, and also about how weird it is going door-to-door trying to convert people to Mormonism.

Crossdresser: Growing Up Trans in the 1990s and 2000s, by Kat Rogue, explores what it does to a closeted trans girl to grow up saturated in the transmisogyny of 1990s pop culture and to come of age online, and how she managed to build her own relationship to femininity despite that. It argues that crossdressing, femme, and transness are more closely linked than some people think, and that Ace Ventura: Pet Detective really could have been great without all the transmisogyny. 

American Teenager
By Nico Lang
Abrams Press

Media coverage tends to sensationalize the fight over how trans kids should be allowed to live, but what is incredibly rare are the voices of the people at the heart of this debate: transgender and gender nonconforming kids themselves. For their groundbreaking new book, journalist Nico Lang spent a year traveling the country to document the lives of transgender, nonbinary, and genderfluid teens and their families. Drawing on hundreds of hours of on-the-ground interviews with them and the people in their communities, American Teenager paints a vivid portrait of what it’s actually like to grow up trans today.

Breaking the Curse
By Alex DiFrancesco
Seven Stories Press

In Breaking the Curse, Alex DiFrancesco takes their own crushing experiences of assault, addiction, and transphobic violence as the starting point for a journey to self-reclamation. Reeling in the aftermath of a rape that played out as painfully in public as in private, DiFrancesco begins to pursue spirituality in earnest, searching for an ancestral connection to magic as a form of protection and pathway to transformation.

Cactus Country
By Zoë Bossiere
Abrams Press 

Newly arrived in the Sonoran Desert, eleven-year-old Zoë’s world is one of giant beetles, thundering javelinas, and gnarled paloverde trees. With the family’s move to Cactus Country RV Park, Zoë has been given a fresh start and a new, shorter haircut. Although Zoë doesn’t have the words to express it, he experiences life as a trans boy—and in Cactus Country, others begin to see him as a boy, too. As Zoë enters adolescence, he must reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence endemic to the working class Cactus Country men he’s grown close to, whose hard masculinity seems as embedded in the desert landscape as the cacti sprouting from parched earth.

Corpses, Fools, and Monsters
Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner
Repeater

In the history of cinema, trans people are usually murdered, made into a joke, or viewed as threats to the normal order—relegated to a lost highway of corpses, fools, and monsters. In this book, trans film critics Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay take the reader on a drive down this lost highway, exploring the way that trans people and transness have evolved on-screen.

Country Queers: A Love Letter
By Rae Garringer
Haymarket Books

Part photo book, part memoir, part oral history project, this volume paints a vivid portrait of queer and trans experiences in rural areas and small towns across the US. Raised on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, Rae Garringer was motivated by an intense frustration with the lack of rural queer stories and the isolation that comes with that absence. Queers, in all our forms, have always existed, Garringer writes, all across this continent since before it was colonized. After years as a DIY, minimally funded, community-based oral history project, the work now takes a new form in Country Queers: A Love Letter-a book of full-color photos and interviews with rural folks from Mississippi to New Mexico and beyond, with Garringer’s account as traveler and interviewer woven through the pages.

Frighten the Horses
By Oliver Radclyffe
Roxane Gay Books

Frighten the Horses is a trans man’s coming of age story, about a housewife who comes out as a lesbian and tentatively, at first, steps into the world of queerness. With growing courage and the support of his newfound community, Oliver is finally able to face the question of his gender identity and become the man he is supposed to be. The story of a flawed, fascinating, gorgeously queer man, Frighten the Horses introduces Oliver Radclyffe as a witty, arresting, unforgettable voice.

Glorious Bodies
By Colby Gordon
University of Chicago Press

In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change.

It Gets Better…Except When It Gets Worse
By Nicole Maines
The Dial Press 

For the first time, in her own words, Nicole tells the story of her journey from childhood in rural Maine to the spotlights of Hollywood, sharing the lessons she’s learned along the way. With clever wit and unflinching honesty, she tackles some of the most insidious messaging absorbed by queer kids and all young women, from the idea that any one thing can (or should) ever really fix you, to wondering what’s wrong with you when things don’t always feel better, and reminding us that, sometimes, a happy ending is only the beginning of the story.

Make It Count
By Cecé Telfer
Grand Central Publishing

CeCé Telfer is a warrior. The first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA championship, she has contended with transphobia on and off the track since childhood. Now, she stands at the crossroads of a national and international conversation about equity in sports, forced to advocate for her personhood and rights at every turn. After spending years training for the 2024 Olympics, Telfer has been sidelined and silenced more times than she can count. But she’s never been good at taking no for an answer.

Pretty 
By KB Brookins
Knopf

Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as other.

Queering the Runes
By Siri Vincent Plouff
Weiser Books

Siri comes to the runes as a queer, nonbinary reader, and presents a path for reclaiming the ancestral wisdom and mystery of the runes in a way that can provide insight and understanding of their sacred nature for masculine, feminine, and nongendered aspects of self. Written as a love letter to the runes, the gods, and the people who follow the Nordic path, Queering the Runes presents an alternative approach to the runes—one that creates a gentle container for those who want to follow this heathen path.

Poetry

Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water
By E. Hughes
Haymarket Books

Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, a debut collection by E. Hughes, marries personal narrative with historical excavation to articulate the intricacies of Black familial love, life, and pain. Tracing the experiences of a southern Black family, their migration to the San Francisco Bay area, and the persistent anti-Blackness there (despite the state’s insistence that it is/was not involved in the US’ projects of imperialism or chattel slavery), Hughes illuminates the intersections of history, grief, and violence.

The Doughnut World
By Jillian A. Fantin
Fifth Wheel Press

Poetry and theatre, sound and vision, sugar scrubbing, tattoo needles, hot oil and big fat veneers: all of this combines into a world shaped like a do(UGH)nut, desperately gripping its inhabitants with severe weather, shorter days, and weighty gravity to compensate for the drag of The Hole. This world, this Doughnut World, poses unique opportunities and challenges for its inhabitants, including: planetary transplant Hucklebaby, CRAVAT the sentient necktie, and a transmasc seahorse collective that only speaks Emily Dickinson.

Feeding the Ghosts
By Rahul Mehta
The University Press of Kentucky

In 2017, writer and educator Rahul Mehta began a writing practice to find solace and beauty—in the natural world, in their family and friends, and in everyday simplicities—during a time of political tensions, environmental disasters, a global pandemic, and personal disappointment. From the vibrant color of a blade of grass, to their dog sleeping quietly in the corner, to delicate petals fallen from a rose, a mindfulness of the beauty in their surroundings helped offset the feelings of fear, outrage, and helplessness. The result of this exercise is a profoundly moving poetry collection that explores Mehta’s South Asian and Appalachian culture, their Queerness, their relationships with self and others, race, privilege, and a deep admiration of nature and the spiritual realm.

Metamourphosis
By Alison Lubar
Fifth Wheel Press

Metamourphosis contemplates the transformative power of particularly queer, sapphic love, in all of its expressions: through grief, new relationship energy, and non-linear healing. The section titles are portmanteaus, playing on both the idea of evolution, and of the illusion of a binary. And while these smaller divisions are worlds in themselves, their cohesive unfolding implies the interconnectedness of all facets, stages, and nuances of love.

Nazarboy
By Tarik Dobbs
Haymarket Books

Tarik Dobbs’s work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with the power dynamics, violence, and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer. They challenge this power in visual, free-verse, and formally intense poems—both traditional and innovative—that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions, and more.

She Who Eats Tourists
By Atalaya Magdelena
Fifth Wheel Press

I wrote She Who Eats Tourists when traveling, via scholarships and favors, between the US Southwest, Midwest, and East Coast. I was looking for something that I didn’t realize at the time was my girlhood, and I missed my home. Because of the direction I traveled, I felt the eyes of a white tourist, superimposed into in my own, reversed back to the East, where the settler colonial imagination has mostly strongly emanated, and irradiated since the dawn of Westward Expansion. I needed to understand what those eyes had done to me. This poetry collection is essentially various attempts to write one kind of poem, a poem that will feel, as a consolation, like justice to read.

Spilling the Light
By Julián Jamaica Soto
Skinner House Books

Intimate and uncompromising, Rev. Julián Jamaica, Soto’s debut collection Spilling the Light, is a luminous offering to their communities and a defiant declaration of their worth in a world hostile to their queer, disabled, and brown being. America, is this freedom? they ask. I cannot prove to you that / I am a person, writing boldly of identity, community, liberation, and erasure through a prism of tender moments and powerful reckonings.

Transgenesis
By Ava Nathaniel Winter
Milkweed Editions

An excavatory collection of poems tracing the connections between Jewish transfemininity, queer desire, and cultural histories.Selected by Sean Hill for the National Poetry Series, this collection is a scrupulous chronicle of individual and cultural knowledge. In an exceptional debut, Ava Nathaniel Winter challenges our concepts of the beautiful and the sacred, delving not only into the historically marginalized, but also into the chilling subconscious of supremacy.

Graphic Novels

The Baker and the Bard
By Fern Haught 
Feiwel & Friends

Juniper and Hadley have a good thing going in Larkspur, spending their respective days apprenticing at a little bakery and performing at the local inn. But when a stranger makes an unusual order at the bakery, the two friends (and Hadley’s pet snake, Fern) set out on a journey to forage the magical mushrooms needed to make the requested galette pastries. Along the way, Juniper and Hadley stumble across a mystery too compelling to ignore: Something has been coming out of the woods at night and eating the local farmers’ crops, leaving only a trail of glowy goo behind. Intent on finally going on an adventure that could fuel their bardic craft, Hadley tows Juniper into the woods to investigate.

Camp Prodigy
By Caroline Palmer
Atheneum Books for Young Readers

After attending an incredible concert, Tate Seong is inspired to become a professional violist. There’s just one problem: they’re the worst musician at their school. Tate doesn’t even have enough confidence to assert themself with their friends or come out as nonbinary to their family, let alone attempt a solo anytime soon. Things start to look up when Tate attends a summer orchestra camp—Camp Prodigy—and runs into Eli, the remarkable violist who inspired Tate to play in the first place. But Eli has been hiding their skills ever since their time in the spotlight gave them a nervous breakdown. Together, can they figure out how to turn Tate into a star and have Eli overcome their performance anxieties? Or will the pressure take them both down?

Homebody
By Theo Parish
HarperAlley

In their comics debut, Theo Parish masterfully weaves an intimate and defiantly hopeful memoir about the journey one nonbinary person takes to find a home within themself. Combining traditional comics with organic journal-like interludes, Theo takes us through their experiences with the hundred arbitrary and unspoken gender binary rules of high school, from harrowing haircuts and finally the right haircut to the intersection of gender identity and sexuality—and through tiny everyday moments that all led up to Theo finding the term nonbinary, which finally struck a chord.

Lunar Boy
By Jes and Cin Wibowo
Harperalley

Indu, a boy from the moon, feels like he doesn’t belong. He hasn’t since he and his adoptive mom disembarked from their spaceship—their home—to live on Earth with their new blended family. The kids at school think he’s weird, he has a crush on his pen pal who might not like him back, and his stepfamily doesn’t seem to know what to do with him. In a moment of loneliness, Indu calls out to the moon, begging them to take him back. And against all odds, the moon hears him and agrees to bring him home on the first day of the New Year. But as the promised day draws nearer, Indu finds friendship in unlikely places and discovers that home is more than where you come from. And when the moon calls again, Indu must decide: Is he willing to give up what he’s just found?

The Ribbon Skirt 
By Cameron Mukwa
Graphix

Ten-year-old Anang wants to make a ribbon skirt, a piece of clothing typically worn by girls in the Anishinaabe tradition, for an upcoming powwow. Anang is two-spirit and nonbinary and doesn’t know what others will think of them wearing a ribbon skirt, but they’re determined to follow their heart’s desire. Anang sets off to gather the materials needed to make the skirt and turns to those around them—their family, their human and turtle friends, the crows, and even the lake itself—for help.

Upstsaged 
By Robin Easter
Little, Brown Ink

This is it: the last hurrah, the final curtain call. Ever since sixth grade, Ashton Price and their best friend and enduring crush, Ivy Santos, have spent their summers together at theater camp. Now it’s their last year before they part ways for high school, and Ash is determined to end it on a high note! With Ash as stage manager and Ivy the lead in this year’s musical, this summer’s shaping up to be everything the two could have hoped for. Maybe Ash will even work up the courage to ask Ivy out! But between Ivy rehearsing long hours with her colead and Ash throwing themself into an ambitious stage production, will they end up drifting apart instead?

Young Adult

At the End of the River Styx
By Michelle Kulwicki
Page Street YA

Before he can be reborn, Zan has spent 499 years bound in a 500-year curse to process souls for the monstrous Ferryman—and if he fails he dies. In Portland, Bastian is grieving. He survived a car accident that took his mother and impulse-purchased a crumbling bookstore with the life insurance money. But in sleep, death’s mark keeps dragging Bastian into Zan’s office. It shouldn’t be a problem to log his soul and forget he ever existed. But when Zan follows Bastian through his memories of grief and hope, Zan realizes that he is not ready for Bastian to die.

Flyboy
By Kasey LeBlanc
Balzer & Bray/Harperteen

After an incident at his school leaves closeted trans teenager Asher Sullivan needing stitches, his mother betrays him in the worst possible way—she sends him to Catholic school for his senior year. Now he has to contend with hideous plaid skirts, cranky nuns, and #bathroomJesus. Nighttime brings an escape for Asher when he dreams of the Midnight Circus—the one place where he is seen for the boy he truly is. Too bad it exists only in his sleep. At least, that’s what he believes until the day his annoyingly attractive trapeze rival, Apollo, walks out of his dreams and into his classroom. On the heels of this realization that the magical circus might be real, Asher also learns that his time there is limited. 

Lockjaw 
By Matteo L. Cerilli
Tundra Books

Chuck Warren died tragically at the old abandoned mill, but Paz Espino knows it was no accident — there’s a monster under the town, and she’s determined to kill it before anyone else gets hurt. She’ll need the help of her crew — inseparable friends, bound by a childhood pact stronger than diamonds, distance or death — to hunt it down. But she’s up against a greater force of evil than she ever could have imagined. With shifting timeframes and multiple perspectives, Lockjaw is a small-town ghost story, where monsters living and dead haunt the streets, the homes and the minds of the inhabitants.

Lucy Uncensored
By Mel and Teghan Hammond
Knopf Books for Young Readers

Lucy imagines college as more than a chance to party with other drama nerds and be roommates with her best friend Callie. College will be her fresh start. For the first time, she’ll be able to introduce herself as Lucy to people she hasn’t gone to school with since kindergarten. While Lucy and Callie are on their campus tour for their dream school, two kids from their high school make the typical transphobic comments Lucy’s gotten used to in her small town. She starts to worry that her dream school might end up being High School 2.0. When Lucy finds a beautiful school with a great theater program on a list of the most LGBTQ+ friendly colleges, it seems like fate—except that the school is hundreds of miles away. And there’s something unexpected about it: it’s a women’s college. 

The No Girlfriend Rule
By Christen Randall
Atheneum Books for Young Readers

For Hollis, a fat, broke girl with anxiety, the start of senior year brings enough to worry about. Her relationship with her boyfriend, Chris, isn’t particularly exciting, but it’s comfortable and familiar, and Hollis wants it to survive beyond senior year. To prove she’s a girlfriend worth keeping, Hollis decides to learn Chris’s favorite tabletop roleplaying game, Secrets & Sorcery—but his unfortunate No Girlfriends at the Table rule means she’ll need to find her own group if she wants in. Enter: Gloria Castañeda and her all-girls game of S&S! Crowded at the table in Gloria’s cozy Ohio apartment, the six girls battle twisted magic in-game and become fast friends outside it. With her character as armor, Hollis starts to believe that maybe she can be more than just fat, anxious, and a little lost.

Old Wounds
By Logan-Ashley Kisner
Delacorte Press

Erin and Max are two transgender teens trying to get to California. Max is desperate to finally transition, and Erin is longing to understand why she’s on this trip to begin with. The last she spoke to Max was when he suddenly broke up with her two years ago. But when they find themselves stranded in the middle of the woods in a small Kentucky town, they realize they have much bigger problems. The locals need a female sacrifice for the monster that lives in the woods—according to them, the sun won’t come up again until the monster eats a girl…and it only eats what it kills.

Time and Time Again
By Chatham Greenfield
Bloomsbury YA

Phoebe Mendel’s day is never ending—literally. On August 6th, she woke up to find herself stuck in a time loop. And for nearly a month of August 6ths since, Phoebe has relived the same day: pancakes with Mom in the morning, Scrabble with Dad in the afternoon, and constant research into how to reach tomorrow and make it to her appointment with a doctor who may actually take her IBS seriously. Everything is exactly, agonizingly the same. That is, until the most mundane car crash ever sends Phoebe’s childhood crush Jess crashing into the time loop.

The Wildnerness of Girls
By Madeline Claire Franklin
Zando Young Readers 

After being placed in foster care, Rhi is hungry for a fresh start and begins working at the Happy Valley Wildlife Preserve. While in the woods, she stumbles upon a surreal sight: a pack of wolves guarding four feral and majestic girls. After Rhi gains their trust, they reveal that they’re princesses from another land, raised by a magical prophet they call Mother—and they’re convinced Rhi is their lost fifth sister. Unsure what to believe, Rhi ushers the girls to civilization, where they’re met with societal uproar and scrutiny. Desperate to return to their kingdom, the girls look to Rhi for help.

Middle Grade & Children’s 

A Song for Nolan
By Sally Chen, Rushie Ellenwood
Little Bee Books

When Nolan is invited to a birthday party at the roller rink, they are so excited. They pick out the perfect, sparkling outfit, tie on their snazzy skates, and join their friends for a day of roller skating bliss. But when the DJ calls for a boys skate followed by a girls skate, Nolan feels left out. With courage and a strong sense of self, Nolan bravely requests a song for EVERYONE.

Accidental Demons
By Clare Edge
HarperCollins

For the youngest in a long line of witches, demons used to be no big deal. A spell and a quick prick of the finger, and a witch like Ber could summon a demon to do anything she needed—clean a mess, send a message, you name it. But that was before Ber was diagnosed with diabetes. Now each time she tests her blood sugar, accidental demons are slipping into the human dimension…and causing absolute chaos.

The Flicker
By HE. Edgmon
Feiwel & Friends

One year ago, a solar flare scorched the Earth and destroyed life as we know it. With their parents gone and supplies running dangerously low, step-sisters Millie and Rose only have one chance at survival: leave home with their infant half-brother and loyal dog Corncob in search of Millie’s grandma, a Seminole elder. As they navigate the burning land with a group of fellow survivors, dodging The Hive, a villainous group that has spent the last year hoarding supplies and living in luxury, the siblings have to learn to rely on each other more than ever, and discover how to build a new life from the ashes.

The Lumbering Giants of Whispering Pines
By Mo Netz
Clarion Books

Ever since her dad died, 11-year-old Jerry Blum and her mom have bounced around dead-end towns, staying in a series of rundown motels where her mother picks up housekeeping work and Jerry can get around in her wheelchair. But the Slumbering Giant motel is different. Lights blink on and off in the surrounding trees, a mysterious radio station plays only at midnight, and people disappear into the woods, never to been seen again. Not to mention that Jerry’s mom keeps vanishing to do special work that she refuses to discuss. When her mother doesn’t come home one morning, Jerry springs into action.

Magica Riot
By Kara Buchannan
Storm Maiden

The last night of Claire Ryland’s old life in the closet was pretty normal, aside from the alley fight with interdimensional monsters. Fortunately, the drummer of her favorite local band transformed into a magical girl and saved her. Then Claire became a magical girl as well. Things got a little complicated after that. Now Claire is juggling two new lives: living as a girl and as a member of Portland’s super-secret supernatural defense squad, the hard-rocking magical girls known as…Magica Riot!

Splinter & Ash
By Marieke Nijkamp
Greenwillow Books

Ash—or Princess Adelisa—is the youngest child of the queen, recently returned to the city of Kestrel’s Haven after spending six years on the other side of the country. Ash was hoping for a joyous reunion, but the reality is far from it. Her mother is holding the kingdom together by a thread; her brother has only taunts and jibes for her; and court is full of nobles who openly mock and dismiss Ash, who uses a cane and needs braces to strengthen her joints. Splinter is the youngest child of one of Haven’s most prominent families. She’s fierce, determined, and adventurous, and she has her sights set on becoming a knight just like her older brother. Even if everyone says she can’t because she’s not a boy. So what? She’s not a girl, either. A chance encounter throws Ash and Splinter into each other’s orbits and changes the course of the kingdom’s history.