We've put together a reading list of books about queer and trans politics, history, and liberation, offered in solidarity with everyone across the world standing up against injustice. For the month of June, we’re glad to offer 40% Off the Haymarket titles on this list!

Golden’s collection of poetry and photography illuminates a path through national uprisings, anti-trans violence, family loss, and a global pandemic. These sonically playful poems and assertive, color-saturated portraits reveal a stark vulnerability that invites readers to look deeply at times of great and, possibly, liberatory uncertainty.

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.

The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black lesbian feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s.

"If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free." —Combahee River Collective Statement

There are trans people here in the past, the present, and the future. H. Melt’s writing centers the deep care, love, and joy within trans communities. This poetry collection describes moments of resistance in queer and trans history as catalysts for movements today.

A vital history of organizing within and beyond the walls of women’s prisons in the 1970s, illuminating a crucial chapter in today’s abolition feminist struggles.

What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate—even incompatible—political projects.

Saving Our Own Lives, an anthology of essays from long-time organizer Shira Hassan, tells the stories of how sex workers, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, queer folks, trans, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit people are – and have been – building systems of change and support outside the societal frameworks of oppression and exploitation.

In a series of journal entries—some original passages, others revisited and expanded in retrospect—renowned writer and poet Cherrié Moraga details her experiences with pregnancy, birth, and the early years of lesbian parenting. 

Powerhouse, world-renowned queer poet and spoken-word artist Staceyann Chin curates the first full-length collection of her poems.

An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by “community?"

An indispensable history and contemporary guide to the struggle for authentic sexual equality and liberation.

This heart wrenchingly vivid account of one man's arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis for the crime of homosexuality, now with a new foreword by Sarah Schulman, is an essential contribution to gay history and our understanding of historical fascism, as well as a remarkable and complex story of survival and identity. 

Recent victories for LGBT rights have gone faster than most people imagined possible. Yet the accompanying rise of gay 'normality' has been disconcerting for activists with radical sympathies. This book shows how the successive 'same-sex formations' of the past century and a half have led both to the emergence of today's 'homonormativity' and 'homonationalism' and to ongoing queer resistance.

A BreakBeat Poets anthology of writings by Muslims who are women, queer, genderqueer, nonbinary, and/or trans.

How do you imagine trans liberation while living in a cis world? On My Way To Liberation follows a gender nonconforming body moving through the streets of Chicago. From the sex shop to the farmers market, the family dinner table to the bookstore, trans people are everywhere, though often erased. Writing towards a trans future, H. Melt envisions a world where trans people are respected, loved and celebrated every day.

Women’s sexuality is often used as a weapon against them. In this powerful debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries.

What is political poetry and linguistic activism? What does it mean to bear witness through writing? When language proves insufficient, how do we find and articulate a pathway forward? 

Faculty and instructors interested in adopting Haymarket titles for their courses can request Exam and Desk copies directly from our distributor, here.