A Celebration of Pride and LGBTQ+ Stories

By Sharma Shields

When I think of Pride Month in the Inland Northwest, I think about the wealth of LGBTQ+ literature we have here in Spokane. Poet Kathryn Smith won the Jake Adam York Prize from Milkweed Press for her “lush and deathy” collection Self-Portrait with Cephalopod (I love the word ‘deathy’). Novelist Alexis M. Smith has won the nationally lauded Lambda Literary Award and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for her exquisite novel Marrow Island. Her breathtaking novel Glaciers was just reissued with a new cover by Tin House Books. Erin Pringle’s latest story collection, Unexpected Weather Events, is a wintry wonderland of emotion. Former Spokane Public Schools librarian exterior symbiosis of a gay Black man finding refuge from the threat of depression and death in love and desire.” Corinne Manning’s story collection We Had No Rules, has been called “weird, scary, hilarious, hot, and revelatory” (Melissa Febos). Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s widely praised new memoir Touching the Art, in part about the writer’s relationship to a grandmother that, as Sycamore says in an interview on Shondaland, initially nourished but then disparaged her for, “everything that made me different—my femininity, my introspection, my creativity, my empathy...everything that made me queer and femme.”

Stephanie Oakes’ latest novel, The Meadows, is a deep dive into the horrors of conversion therapy and is one of the very best novels I read in 2023. Local queer columnist Kiantha Duncan publishes advice in The Spokesman-Review, where she has urged readers to “cancel fear and focus on inclusivity,” a message all of us need to carefully and thoughtfully absorb. There is an abundance of wealth, too, in the greater Northwest literary scene. Richard Fifield’s The Flood Girls—set in a tiny town in northern Montana— saved my life when I was getting sober. Nicola Griffith’s So Lucky—about multiple sclerosis and the monster of ableism—helped me handle a particularly grueling MS relapse of my own (Griffith is known worldwide, too, for her meaty queer Arthurian novels, Hild and Menewood). Megan Kruse’s Call Me Home explores themes of abuse, family, and home with wondrous complexity—no wonder Kruse was a National Book Award Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree.

Putsata Reang’s memoir, Ma and Me, also discusses the complexity and pain carried within both individual and familial bodies, centering the experience of refugees. All four of these fantastic writers are based in Seattle, and Reang has Spokane ties, too, and was once a reporter for The SpokesmanReview.

And for those who love teen/ YA literature, check out nonbinary writer Candice “Cam” Montgomery, whose novels include Home and Away and By Any Means Necessary. My 11-year-old daughter loved the anthology Transmogrify!, which features Montgomery’s work.

Our current Washington State Poet Laureate, Arianne True (Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations), is currently editing an anthology of queer poetry by WA State writers. I love the work True is doing to amplify a platform for queer voices. Follow Arianne True on the ArtsWA website, arts.wa.gov.

There have always been queer people, queer communities, and exceptional queer artists. The books I’ve mentioned here are only a small sampling of the LGBTQ+ writing we’re lucky enough to engage with in our region.

And there’s more from these Seattle writers: Luther Hughes’s beautiful new poetry collection, A Shiver in the Leaves, which “wrestles with the interior and

Sharma Shields is the Writing Education Specialist at Spokane Public Library.