June is Pride Month, and it is also Rainbow Book Month™, a nationwide celebration of the authors and writings that reflect the lives and experiences of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, pansexual, genderqueer, queer, intersex, agender, and asexual community.
If you are looking for some LGBTQIA+ literature to celebrate, look no further than the Stonewall Book Awards, sponsored by the American Library Association's Rainbow Round Table. These awards include the Barbara Gittings Literature Award, the Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award, and the Mike Morgan and Larry Romans Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award. Collectively, they honor books of exceptional merit relating to the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender experience.
Check these out at your local library this summer!
Barbara Gittings Literature Award
The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar (Atria Books)
Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award
Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games by Bonnie Ruberg (they/them) (Duke University Press)
Mike Morgan & Larry Romans Children’s & Young Adult Literature Award
We Are Little Feminists: Families designed by Lindsey Blakely, written by Archaa Shrivastav (Little Feminist)
Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
- The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi, (Riverhead Books)
- Memorial by Bryan Washington, (Riverhead Books)
- More Than Organs by Kay Ulanday Barrett, (Sibling Rivalry Press)
- Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, (Graywolf Press)
Stonewall Honor Books in Literature Shortlist
- Boys of Alabama by Genevieve Hudson, (Liveright Publishing Corporation)
- Plain Bad Heroines: A Novel by Emily M. Danforth & Sara Lautman, ( William Morrow and Company)
- The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue, (Little, Brown and Company)
- The Subtweet by Vivek Shraya, ( ECW Press)
- Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko, (HarperVia)
Stonewall Honor Books in Non-Fiction
- My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland, (Tin House Books)
- The Fixed Stars: A Memoir by Molly Wizenberg, (Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS)
- Paper Bullets by Jeffrey H. Jackson, (Algonquin Books, a division of Workman Publishing)
- XOXY: A Memoir by Kimberly M. Zieselman, (Jessica Kingsley Publishers)
Stonewall Honor Books in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
- Beetle & The Hollowbones, illustrated and written by Aliza Layne (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division)
- Darius the Great Deserves Better, written by Adib Khorram (Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC)
- Felix Ever After written by Kacen Callender (Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers)
- You Should See Me in a Crown, written by Leah Johnson (Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.)
