12 New and Emerging LGBTQ+ Writers to Read for Pride 2023

Jenny Fran Davis’ 2017 book, Everything Must Go, is a tender, funny, and profound YA novel, but her brand-new adult debut, Dykette, is something to behold. Young lesbian couple Sasha and Jesse are invited with their other queer-couple friends Lou and Darcy on a getaway by older lesbian couple Jules and Miranda. Over 10 days in December at Jules and Miranda’s holiday home, tensions and fractures reveal themselves on social media, in the sauna, and in other unexpected ways. Dykette is an engrossing portrait of queer life, striking a perfect balance between social satire and comedy and a character and relationship study.

Jennifer Neal is a Florida-raised (though now she lives in Germany) writer and artist whose work radiates with curiosity, empathy, and a deep reverence for storytelling. In this wonderful debut, Gabrielle is a young Black and Indigenous woman in the 1990s whose father, a Black Republican lawyer in Florida, embodies patriarchy with the way he wields power over Gabrielle and her mother in their cold, white-marble home. But Gabrielle and her mother possess the maternal line’s power to change their skin color. And while Gabrielle’s father wants them both to pass for white when he’s around them, they can embody all kinds of colors. Gabrielle’s life changes when she begins to take piano lessons from a young, queer Jamaican woman and learns more about the possibilities within herself.

Written anonymously under a pseudonym, Lamya H’s debut memoir is in some ways rooted in the tradition of Leslie Feinberg’s seminal classic Stone Butch Blues in the sense that it explores gender, sexuality, and intersections of identity. But Hijab Butch Blues carries its own torch forward, lighting the way for even more readers. Drawing on their experience grappling with queerness and Muslim faith, and as an organizer and activist, Lamya H has created a modern classic.

C.E. McGill is a science and speculative fiction writer from Scotland (with a stint in the southeastern U.S.). This is their debut novel, and it starts from a place many have trod before: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But this reimagining of that world is nuanced and hypnotic, following Victor Frankenstein’s great-niece Mary, who lives in 1850s London. While she and her husband are pursuing science careers in the midst of a time of discovery, she learns a secret about her uncle’s past, and a Gothic mystery (with plenty of queer love and desire) unfolds. This one is perfect for science nerds!

Jinwoo Chong is a powerhouse fiction writer, and his debut novel proves this in spades. It contains intricate interwoven storylines that center many versions of a character who is obsessed with an ’80s TV star with multiple sexual assault allegations. Playing out over multiple timelines, the book explores fandom, biotechnology, the nature of scams and capitalism, grief, and queer Asian American identity. I’ve said enough, but if you’re itching for a little bit more, check out our interview with Chong for the “Authors to Watch” series.

Exploring queer love and self-actualization in their YA novels, Garza Villa is a Tejane and Chicane writer from Texas whose first book, Fifteen Hundred Miles From the Sun, was a 2021 Kirkus Best Young Adult Fiction book, among other accolades. In Ander & Santi Were Here, a new waiter is hired at nonbinary teen Ander’s family’s taqueria the summer before they are set to leave for art school. As Ander and Santi fall in love, everything feels warm and magical, but ICE is targeting the neighborhood, and Santi is undocumented. Garza Villa’s third book, Canto Contigo, is already set to be published in 2024, and their stories are everything you could want from queer YA.

This debut novel follows a writer named Mickey, a Black queer woman working at what appears from the outside to be a dream media job in New York. She thinks she has her life figured out — she has a caring girlfriend, and despite the everyday indignities of her job, she feels it will launch her to greater success. But when she loses that job and is sent into a tailspin — and after writing a letter detailing the terrible ways she was treated, and it is ignored — she moves back to her hometown in Maryland, a place she begins to learn to love. But when a larger media industry reckoning begins and her letter suddenly finds a new audience, she is torn between versions of her life in different places and unsure what to do. Tembe Denton-Hurst is herself a beauty and culture writer for “The Strategist” at New York magazine, and her writing sings on the page.

In this first book from Roxane Gay’s imprint at Grove Atlantic, Nigerian writer and activist Ani Kayode Somtochukwu, who is just 23, has delivered an incredible novel. It follows track star August, a young man from Enugu who is in his first year of university and adjusting well. But when he and an openly gay student named Segun fall for each other, August feels the need to keep it secret to protect his sports career and opportunities, especially as Nigeria passes a broad anti-gay law.

In their slim but powerful 2020 debut, Heaven, Emerson Whitney blended memoir, queer theory, and philosophy to create a potent exploration of the body and gender. With their sophomore book, Daddy Boy, Whitney tracks a major transition in their life: Their long-term relationship with a dominatrix is coming to an end, and tired by the state of submissiveness, they are reckoning with aging and the idea of home. They decide to join a group of storm chasers, and along the way philosophize on dads and daddies of all kinds (including their own biological father and stepfathers), the meaning of dominance, and the power of this Earth. While Whitney has been on the scene for a while, their body of work is growing in exciting ways, and this second book is a true treasure.

Pidgeon Pagonis is a longtime activist and advocate for the rights of intersex people, including children, who are often forced into a binary sex or gender socially and/or medically. In their debut memoir, they recount their own experience of having their intersex identity hidden from them as a child, being raised as a girl until puberty, when deeper truths about their body and their self came to the surface. Pagonis writes about the trauma of forced binaries alongside the joy of self-actualization, and how they carry their own journey into liberation work for the intersex community more broadly. It’s a beautifully written and clear-eyed book that goes beyond the basics of what intersex means to show the full mosaic of what it is to be human.

Leslie Sainz is the managing editor of the New England Review and has a slew of published poems and fellowships under her belt, but this is her first full-length collection. Sainz’s parents are Cuban exiles, and this collection experiments with form as well as queer and feminist lenses to grapple with the idea of exile, immigration, queer women, mothers and daughters, and more. It’s a glorious book of poems that is well worth the wait until its release in September.

Soula Emmanuel is an Irish Greek trans autistic writer based in Ireland. In this beautiful debut novel, we follow Phoebe Forde, an Irish Ph.D. candidate three years into her gender transition and building a new life in Copenhagen. While she relishes the freedom of living in a place where no one knows her past, she gets a visit from her ex-girlfriend Grace, and their love rekindles in a way Phoebe doesn’t expect. Grappling with nostalgia and memory alongside the meaning and desire behind moving forward, this book portrays millennial life in a dying world and the rich inner life of an unforgettable character.

—

Sarah Neilson is a freelance culture writer and interviewer whose work regularly appears in The Seattle Times, Them, and Shondaland, among other outlets. They are an alum of the Tin House craft intensive, and their memoir writing has been published in Catapult and Ligeia.

Get Shondaland directly in your inbox: SUBSCRIBE TODAY