LGBTQ+

Driven by her passion to nurture the connection between poetry and people, Miami-Dade County Poet Laureate Caridad Moro-Gronlier will launch Generation 305: An Intergenerational Poetry Project at Miami Book Fair. Moderated by Moro-Gronlier and Nicole Tallman, poetry ambassador for Miami-Dade County, this event will showcase Generation 305 poems written to promote, develop, and create multigenerational dialogue, as well as preserve the intergenerational stories in our community. Come listen to Generation 305 poems by selected project poets Richard Blanco,…

Each fall, Miami Book Fair invites the authors and translators of 50 National Book Award longlisted titles to gather in Miami following the National Book Awards Ceremony in New York. Join the honorees in poetry – Gbenga Adesina, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Cathy Linh Che, Tiana Clark, Rickey Laurentiis, Esther Lin, Natalie Shapero, Richard Siken, and Patricia Smith – as they read from and discuss their books and answer your questions about writing,…

Each fall, Miami Book Fair invites the authors and translators of 50 National Book Award longlisted titles to gather in Miami following the National Book Awards Ceremony in New York. Join the honorees in nonfiction – Caleb Gayle, Julia Ioffe, Lana Lin, Ben Ratliff, Claudia Rowe, Nilo Tabrizy, Jordan Thomas, and Helen Whybrow – as they read from and discuss their books and answer your questions about writing,…

In Kristen Arnett’s  Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One: A Novel, Cherry is a down-on-her-luck professional clown who juggles gigs, side jobs, and family drama. Enter Margot the Magnificent, an alluring magician whose mentorship – and attraction – push Cherry to risk it all. Facing some big questions, she’ll have to decide what kind of clown she wants to be underneath her suit. Jade Chang’s What a Time to Be Alive: A Novel follows Lola,…

Jaquira Díaz’s This Is the Only Kingdom: A Novel is the epic story of a mother and daughter, imagining a life beyond their working-class Puerto Rican community and wrestling with the aftermath of a murder. When tragedy shatters their family, Maricarmen and her daughter, Nena, land in the middle of a murder investigation and must navigate generational grief, betrayal, and survival. Quiara Alegría Hudes’ The White Hot: A Novel is the story of a runaway mother’s 10 days of freedom – and the pain,…

Tehila Hakimi’s Hunting in America: A Novel tells the story of an Israeli woman who relocates to the United States on assignment from her tech company. Wanting to leave her past behind and adapt to American culture, she joins her colleagues on a deer hunt. As she takes up hunting, she is drawn into a world of predator, prey, and dark attraction. Lena, the central character in Ivy Pochoda’s Ecstasy: A Novel, wants her life back.…

In Allison King’s The Phoenix Pencil Company: A Novel, a hidden magic – the ability to reforge pencils and revive the memories they contain – binds college recluse Monica to her fading grandmother, Yun, and a long-kept family secret. Blending Yun’s wartime past in Shanghai with Monica’s present-day search for connection, King presents a moving saga of memory, family, and the power of stories. In Stuart Nadler’s Rooms for Vanishing: A Novel, war has blown apart the universe of the Altermans,…

In Charlie Jane Anders’ Lessons in Magic and Disaster, a young witch teaches her grieving mother magic with unexpected results. Jamie, a grad student with a powerful secret, helps her mother Serena come out of her shell. But hidden truths from Serena’s past and a mysterious 1749 book threaten to unravel them both – unless Jamie can uncover the scandal it hides and the true nature of magic. Yael and Margot, childhood friends, reunite at a decision time in their lives.…

In Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs reveals how profoundly James Baldwin’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships, spanning the Black American painter Beauford Delaney to the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, Baldwin’s long-overlooked last great love. Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. She was the first Black woman to write and publish science fiction at a time,…

Written over the span of a decade, Green of All Heads is a work of formal range and emotional urgency. In the coinciding wakes of tragic loss and new motherhood, Aracelis Girmay examines the entangled temporalities of an aging parent and newly born children. In A Sharper Silence, Michael Hettich reaches into the wilds to find some measure of the eternal that might wedge itself between himself and the unthinkable: the death of his beloved. He calls upon memory as if to rewind their lives together and forestall the inevitable.…

In The River’s Daughter: A Memoir, leading whitewater guide Bridget Crocker traces her journey from a turbulent childhood in Wyoming after her parents’ divorce to rafting some of the world’s fiercest rivers. Amid danger, loss, and betrayal, the river becomes her teacher, showing her the possibilities of transformation through nature. In Trauma Plot: A Life, Jamie Hood tells the story of three decades marred by sexual violence and the wreckage it leaves behind. Hood invokes infamous figures,…

The Royal We: A Memoir documents Roddy Bottum’s coming of age – and out of the closet. Bottum chronicles his travels from growing up gay without role models in Los Angeles to 1980s San Francisco, where he formed the Grammy-nominated band Faith No More. He went on to tour the world, surviving heroin addiction and the plight of AIDS, and ultimately became a queer icon. Thomas Mallon’s The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries,…

In Javier Fuentes’ Countries of Origin: A Novel, pastry chef Demetrio returns to Spain as an undocumented immigrant, leaving behind his beloved uncle in New York. On the flight, he meets the sensitive, aristocratic Jacobo, sparking a subtle electricity. Amid Madrid’s bars and coastal beaches, they form an intense relationship, navigating identity, class, and intimacy, until a family tragedy forces them to confront their true feelings. In Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories,…

In Rosie Danan’s Fan Service, small-town outcast Alex only fits in on the fan forum she built for her cult werewolf detective show. When its washed-up star Devin wakes up with claws, fangs, and no memory of the previous night, he turns to Alex – who secretly despises him – for help. The reluctant allies team up and lower their guards as they try to wrangle his inner beast. Asher Bennett and Theo Fernandez, the leads in Chip Pons’ Winging It with You,…

Join us for a discussion on the tender and difficult poetry found between religious traditions, queer desire, Jewish transfemininity, cultural histories, and the ethical knots of sacred texts. Structured around the 12 parshiyot (portions) of Genesis, JESSICA JACOBS’ unalone parallels immersion in Jewish teachings with the contemporary world and the author’s experiences growing up queer, embracing one’s sexuality, reversing roles as the adult child of aging parents, and other imposed roles of womanhood. In Transgenesis, AVA NATHANIEL WINTER challenges concepts of the beautiful and the sacred,…

In JENNIFER CROFT’s The Extinction of Irena Rey: A Novel, eight translators visit a renowned author in a primeval Polish forest, who then mysteriously vanishes – leaving them to become entangled in a web of paranoia, isolation, and obsession. In A.J. FINN’s End of Story: A Novel, a reclusive mystery novelist sends his longtime correspondent a cryptic message: “I’ll be dead in three months. Come tell my story. You and I might even solve an old mystery or two.” Did the perfect crime writer commit the perfect crime? …

LOUIS BAYARD’s The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts revolves around a fateful summer in the life of famous playwright Oscar Wilde as he was exposed – and eventually imprisoned – for homosexuality. This poignant story is told from various perspectives, including that of his wife, who watches the intensity of Wilde’s relationship with another man threaten the foundation of their family’s life. MARGOT LIVESEY’s The Road from Belhaven: A Novel is the story of a young woman in 19th-century Scotland whose ability to see into the future complicates her coming-of-age.…

MESHA MAREN’s Shae: A Novel is the story of a young couple in the heart of West Virginia: the title character, who is pregnant, and Cam, who begins using female pronouns. After the traumatic birth of their child, Shae struggles with opioid addiction while Cam continues to transition, embracing new relationships and facing the reality of being a trans woman in rural America. JENNIFER BELLE’s Swanna in Love: A Novel begins with its 14-year-old protagonist being picked up at summer camp by her mom and her new Russian lover.…

ARMEN DAVOUDIAN’s The Palace of Forty Pillars tells the story of a self estranged from the world around him as a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America in order to recreate, in art’s reflection, the image of a lost home. SARETTA MORGAN opens Alt-Nature to the desert as a practice of sensuality in which landscapes and Black queer social ecologies illuminate an anti-map of being and becoming along meridians of environmental degradation,…

Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake is KOMAIL AIJAZUDDIN’s story of courage, love, and bravery. Growing up in Pakistan, ashamed of his body and knowing he was different, he believed his only chance at happiness existed in a gay-friendly America. But after arriving in a post-9/11 world, he was forced to navigate prejudice and self-doubt in his quest for a meaningful life. In his part memoir-in-essays, part cultural critique Mean Boys: A Personal History, queer Chinese American writer GEOFFREY MAK speaks of boys wielding cruelty to claim their place in the pecking order.…

SIMON DOONAN’s The Camp 100: Glorious flamboyance, from Louis XIV to Lil Nas X celebrates all things camp – the strange, hard-to-define quality shared by Grace Jones, Benjamin Disraeli, Salvador Dalí, RuPaul, and other iconic figures. Featuring 100 unapologetically camp people, objects, art movements, and more, The Camp 100 is a manifesto that brings humor and irony to an all-too-serious world. Moderated by fashion print and broadcast journalist RODNER FIGUEROA. PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE MIAMI FASHION INSTITUTE AT MDC.…

Miami Book Fair’s own inaugural Emerging Writer Fellow in Poetry GABRIEL RAMIREZ (2021) returns to the Magic City with his debut poetry collection, If Pit Bulls Had a God, It’d Be a Pit Bull, which examines how violent prejudices can be met with and redirected by a holy tenderness. After two years of artistic silence, Bluff is DANEZ SMITH’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet in the wake of the pandemic and protest following the murder of George Floyd in their hometown of the Twin Cities.…

Believing in yourself is hard enough without saving the whole world on top of it all! Find out how much Amari is willing to sacrifice to stop a war between the Magicians and the Bureau in the action-packed third installment of B. B. ALSTON’s bestselling Supernatural Investigations series, Amari and the Despicable Wonders. RYAN GRAUDIN’s The Girl Who Kept the Castle introduces Faye, a maid for the late Wizard West, who must help him find a successor,…

Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir captures ZOË BOSSIERE’s experience as a trans child growing up in an Arizona trailer park. As they reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence endemic to the traditionally masculine, working-class men in their life, they struggle to escape what it means to live in a gendered body. In EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG’s Housemates: A Novel, two new roommates begin an intense friendship. When one woman receives a complicated inheritance from a former professor,…

I Will Do Better: A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love is CHARLES BOCK’s frank, tender memoir of parenting his young daughter while dealing with immense grief in the wake of his wife’s untimely death. In Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones: A Memoir, PRIYANKA MATTOO chronicles her search for home across 40 years and 32 addresses. From leaving her beloved Kashmir as a child amid mounting violence and finding – and losing – friendships in a Saudi Arabian compound to finally settling in Los Angeles,…

The poems in Bound by JUBI ARRIOLA-HEADLEY seek to carve a space in the world for Blackness and queerness that isn’t defined by trauma or lack, where Black and queer folks can create and conjure the worlds they want to live and love in. In Mammal: Sacrifice Is Not a Virtue, ANA MARÍA CABALLERO examines how one’s desire to view the self as in control opposes one’s many emotional hungers and the animalistic need for survival. Buy Bound – Arriola-Headley Buy Mammal: Sacrifice Is Not a Virtue – Caballero  …

ISABELLE CAMILLE’s Sole’s Mom: A Transgender Journey of Love, Loss, and Letting Go offers a deeply poignant exploration of a mother’s emotional journey as she navigates her child’s gender transition within the context of Haitian society. NADÈGE FLEURIMOND’s Haiti Uncovered: A Regional Adventure into the Art of Haitian Cuisine (10th Anniversary Edition) is a culinary journey through Haiti’s diverse regional cuisines, blending personal narratives with traditional recipes to celebrate the rich tapestry of Haitian cultural identity.…

In CRIS ASCUNCE’s My Best Plan: A Novel, Gene has it all – a wonderful daughter, a flourishing career, and the love of her life, Isa. After same-sex marriage is legalized in Spain, Gene has an idea: move there, marry, and finally secure parental rights for her daughter. But Isa refuses, and Gene must make a decision that puts their love to the test. A.J. BERMUDEZ’s Stories No One Hopes Are About Them explores convergences of power,…

In ANDREW BORYGA’s Victim: A Novel, college student Javi is trying to escape a troubled past: a murdered drug dealer father, a struggling mother, and an incarcerated best friend. When a viral essay turns him into a rising star, his best friend, now free from prison, must play along with Javi’s carefully crafted new identity before the truth threatens to ruin everything. ASHA ELIAS’ Pink Glass Houses: A Novel is the story of the elite world of PTA moms at Miami Beach’s most coveted elementary school.…

Join authors T.J. ALEXANDER, Triple Sec; J.J. ARIAS, Guava Flavored Lies: A Lesbian Romance;  LIANA DE LA ROSA, Isabel and The Rogue; ADRIANA HERRERA, An Island Princess Starts a Scandal; K. ARSENAULT RIVERA, Oath of Fire; and ANALEIGH SBRANA, Lore of the Wilds, as they explore how inclusive storytelling and diverse perspectives and experiences enrich the romance genre, the beauty of love in all its forms.…

R.O. KWON’s Exhibit: A Novel is the story of two women – one a brilliant young photographer, one a world-class ballerina mysteriously on hiatus – drawn to each other by their intense artistic drives. After one exposes the lifelong secret of an old family curse, the women become more entangled, and begin to explore hidden desires. In SUSAN MINOT’s Don’t Be A Stranger: A Novel, Ivy Cooper is 52 years old when Ansel Fleming, 20 years her junior,…

S.K. ALI’s Fledgling: The Keeper’s Records of Revolution explores what an Upper Earth princess is to do when she agrees to an arranged marriage to prevent civil war, gets kidnapped by Lower Earth freedom fighters, and then falls in love with one of them. SUSAN DENNARD concludes her pulse-pounding Luminaries trilogy with The Whispering Night, in which Winnie Wednesday’s loyalty comes into question as secrets about her family and a masked Diana are revealed against the backdrop of the Nightmare Masquerade.…

Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir captures ZOË BOSSIERE’s experience as a trans child growing up in an Arizona trailer park. As they reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence endemic to the traditionally masculine, working-class men in their life, they struggle to escape what it means to live in a gendered body. American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era is a moving portrait of eight transgender and nonbinary teenagers.…

Grappling with violence and grief after the loss of his parents, Cyrus is an addict and a poet whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past in KAVEH AKBAR’s Martyr! A Novel. VINSON CUNNINGHAM’s Great Expectations: A Novel spans 18 months in the life of David, working on a senator’s campaign to become the first Black U.S. president and coming to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father.…

In ARMANDO CORREA‘s The Night Travelers: A Novel, four generations of women experience love, loss, war, and hope from the rise of Nazism and the Cuban Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall. ​​JOSH TUININGA’s graphic novel We Are Not Strangers follows a young boy as he learns of his Jewish grandfather’s allyship for Japanese families during the incarceration camps of World War II. And in ALICE WINN’s Memoriam: A Novel,…

This reading honors the life and work of award-winning poet, professor, and LGBTQ+ activist Maureen Seaton (October 20, 1947 – August 26, 2023), author of more than two dozen solo and collaborative books, who touched the lives of so many in Miami and beyond through her poetry, teaching, and kindness. Hosted by poets DENISE DUHAMEL and NICOLE TALLMAN, this tribute gathers a group of local poets to read their favorite poems from Seaton’s expansive collection in memory and celebration of her remarkable literary accomplishments.…

Set at a Victorian London circus, AMIEE GIBBS‘ The Carnivale of Curiosities: A Novel is a tale of Faustian bargains, jealousy, and murder, where for the right price, any wish may be granted. In DEENA MOHAMED’s Shubeik Lubeik, three wishes sold at an unassuming Cairo kiosk link three people, changing their perspectives as well as their lives. Buy The Carnivale of Curiosities: A Novel. – Gibbs Buy Shubeik Lubeik. – Mohamed…

In TANANARIVE DUE‘s work of historical fiction, The Reformatory: A Novel, 12-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr. is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, furthering his journey into the terrors of the Jim Crow South. And in Our Missing Hearts: A Novel by CELESTE NG, a young boy whose mother disappeared when he was 9 receives a mysterious letter, pulling him into a quest to find her. Buy The Reformatory: A Novel. – Due Buy Our Missing Hearts: A Novel.…

Drag’s evolution as an art form, a community, and a mode of liberation is chronicled in ELYSSA MAXX GOODMAN’s Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City, in all its dramatic, provocative, and sparkly glory. In Naked: On Sex, Work, and Other Burlesques, FANCY FEAST delivers an incisive, poignant, and wildly entertaining collection of personal essays that is part exclusive backstage pass and part long-form literary striptease. Buy Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City.…

In JOHN MANUEL ARIAS’ Where There Was Fire: A Novel, 27 years after a blaze erupts at a banana plantation in Costa Rica, a woman is still trying to understand the machinations behind her family’s rupture. In KEVIN JARED HOSEIN’s Hungry Ghosts: A Novel, two sharply disparate households become entwined after a patriarch goes missing. And in RAUL PALMA’s A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens: A Novel, a man mired in debt makes a deal he’ll come to regret.…

In the dystopian Chain-Gang All-Stars: A Novel, NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH offers a clear-eyed look at the American prison system’s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration – and what freedom in this country really means. In JINWOO CHONG’s Flux: A Novel, a young man’s reality unravels when he suspects that his mysterious employers have inadvertently discovered time travel and are using it to cover up a string of violent crimes. And in JONATHAN ESCOFFERY’s If I Survive You,…