Genderqueer and nonbinary people of color often experience increased marginalization, belonging to an ethnic group that seldom recognizes their gender identity and a queer community that subscribes to white norms. Yet for this very reason, they have a lot to teach about how racial, sexual, and gender identities intersect. Their experiences of challenging social boundaries demonstrate how queer communities can become more inclusive and how the recognition of nonbinary genders can be an anti-racist practice. 
 
My Race is My Gender is the first anthology by nonbinary writers of color to include photography and visual portraits, centering their everyday experiences of negotiating intersectional identities. While informed by queer theory and critical race theory, the authors share their personal stories in accessible language. Bringing together Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian perspectives, its six contributors present an intergenerational look at what it means to belong to marginalized queer communities in the U.S. and feel solidarity with a global majority at the same time. They also provide useful insights into how genderqueer and nonbinary activism can both energize and be fueled by such racial justice movements as Black Lives Matter. 

Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success.  In Queer Voices in Hip Hop, Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and positions them within a longer Black queer musical lineage.  Combining musical, textual, and visual analysis with reception history, this book reclaims queer involvement in hip hop by tracing the genre’s beginnings within Black and Latinx queer music-making practices and spaces, demonstrating that queer and trans rappers draw on Ballroom and other cultural expressions particular to queer and trans communities of color in their work in order to articulate their subject positions. By centering the performances of openly queer and trans artists of color, Queer Voices in Hip Hop reclaims their work as essential to the development and persistence of hip hop in the United States as it tells the story of hip hop’s queer roots.

One could certainly say that Kelly Weber’s debut collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, depicts a non-binary experience that does not receive nearly enough representation in the literary landscape. While such an assertion would be factual, this kind of reading would underestimate Weber’s poetic gifts and the full range of the philosophical implications for her work. Weber writes, “What pulls a woman like me / out here alone, they want to know?” As she teases out possible answers to this question, Weber reveals—with remarkable lyricism and grace—the danger, richness, and multiplicity housed within solitary experience and within the individual subject. Adriana Cavererro, the famed scholar of vocal expression, once noted that thought itself is a collective endeavor, made possible by a shared cultural imagination. Weber reveals self as world, self as community in poems that situate an inherited tradition in conversation with postmodern innovation and undertheorized, urgently important concepts of identity. This is an unforgettable first book.