Reading List: Pride Month

As part of of our calendar celebrating national heritage months and observances, explore these selected works that speak to the month of Pride.

Edouard Zelenine, Girlfriends, 1984. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

Poetry

• “Dive” by Jennifer Perrine discusses the hidden spaces that queer people used to have to occupy and the joys/challenges of saying goodbye to such places.
• “Silence of The Lambs: A Starling Is Born” by Reilly D. Cox, from Issue 19, is a poem of birth and becoming, beauty and violence.
• “Choosing a Transitional Object” (Issue 18) by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett is a short but powerful poem about childhood crushes as a queer woman and the struggles of coming out to oneself.
• Alison Prine’s poem “Loss and Its Antonym” (Issue 14) reflects on cherished memories of queer community.
• “We Two Women Can Father A Child” (Issue 15) by Linda Ashok brings to life tender moments of a relationship between two women thinking about parenthood.
• “Twenty Minutes at the Clam Shack” (Issue 13) by Cassie Pruyn captures visceral feelings of young lust and love.

Fiction

• In “Home” by Celeste Mohammed (Issue 21), two young women in Barbados navigate an increasingly complicated romantic and sexual relationship against a backdrop of family conflict and trauma.
• Lyuba Boys by Sophie Crocker follows a young trans man and his best friend as they go to Alaska to dive for mammoth bones. It is a commentary on young love, masculinity, and gender relations. 
• Ben Shattuck’s Pushcart Prize-winning story “The History of Sound” (Issue 16) tells of the love between two young musicians in early twentieth century New England.
• In Emma Copley Eisenberg’s “Forty-Four Thousand Pounds” (Issue 15), a young Appalachian woman remembers a home—and a love—she left behind.
• In “Anguilla Rostrata: American Eel” Callum Angus writes the story of the last eel of the Rio Grande.

Essays

• In “Cadenza,” Isabel Meyers explores family history, the publishing industry, and bringing queer stories to the page. 
• In “Fragments of Shame and Pride” Raed Rafei explores queerness and chronicles the recent history of the LGBTQIA+ movement in Lebanon through personal reflections.
• David Weinstein’s essay “Linnahall” recounts a day tour of Tallinn, Estonia that spurs reflections on loneliness and wandering.