Teens Talk About LGBTQIAP+ YA: Part 1
Earlier this year, we asked teens to tell us about the LGBTQIAP+ YA books that have touched their lives. This is our first round-up of those stories! We are so excited to be able to share these. Books can touch lives in unseen ways, something that is especially the case for LGBTQIAP+ YA books. We wanted to make some of those unseen experiences visible. This series of post is a reminder of why LGBTQIAP+ YA is so important, why it is so necessary for all of us to keep writing and advocating for these books.
“Of Fire and Stars was the first f/f book I had ever read. It was the first time I got to read about two women falling in love in a fantasy novel, my favourite genre. It was something I never experienced before. In other fantasy novels there was little to no f/f representation and when there was they were just background characters whose relationship was never truly developed. Lastly, the chemistry between Denna and Mare changed my view points on overall relationship standards in books.”
-Olivia, 16, Canada
“I am a biromantic asexual, meaning I like both girls and guys, but I don’t experience sexual attraction. I also may be genderfluid, but I’m still trying to figure that out for myself. Not many people understand my sexuality—or lack thereof—so I’m only out to some of my friends. I haven’t come out to my parents yet, but I plan to sometime before I leave for college this fall. It’s hard to tell which I’m more scared of: going to college or coming out to my parents. I don’t know 
what to do or how to say it or how to help them understand. I live in a fairly conservative town, and I don’t know a whole lot of LGBTQIAP+ folks in real life. Something that has helped me accept myself though is LGBTQIAP+ books. I’ve always been careful to make sure that as few as possible of the LGBTQIAP+ books appear obviously LGBTQIAP+ because I don’t want my parents to notice. I’ve read lots of books with gay couples that I love, of course, but there unfortunately aren’t many books with asexual characters. However, when reading What If It’s Us by Adam Silvera and Becky Albertalli, now one of my favorite books, I read about a side character who briefly mentioned being a biromantic asexual, and I honestly cried a bit out of sheer joy. I had never read about an asexual character, let alone a bi ace character. It makes me wonder if straight people realize the impact diverse characters have. That what some may call just an “unnecessary gay character”, means the world to somebody else. There are real live queer folks out there, whether homophobes like it or not, and we deserve to see ourselves in the media. Every single LGBTQIAP+ book has the power to positively impact someone’s life, and it can tell a closeted reader that who they are is not only okay, it’s beautiful. Although I didn’t figure out my sexuality until I was 17, I know there are a lot of kids and young teens who know they’re, for example, trans, and might be struggling with it, but if they see themselves in a book, it truly can make a world of difference. Not only can these books help LGBTQIAP+ people, it can help straight people realize, especially from an early age, that it’s okay to be different, and it could help them be a more empathetic ally. LGBTQIAP+ books remind us that our identities are valid and our differences are beautiful, and I am incredibly grateful to all LGBTQIAP+ authors for writing and publishing their lovely and powerful words.”
-Rachael C, 18
“A lot of queer books have helped me over the years, but probably the most prominent are We Are Okay 
by Nina LaCour, Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann, and Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender. The first taught me a lot about wlw relationships. It also taught me about college and mental health. The second made me realize there’s a wide spectrum to asexuality and that I don’t have to be wholly homosexual. Lastly, the third made me realize my gender and how to be comfortable with who I am.
I think it’s important for teens to see that queerness is not just one thing; it’s not all cis gay white men. Your queerness is a spectrum, it can’t always be defined by one word. No matter what people tell you, there’s queerness all around. It may seem like you’re alone, but sometimes it takes others longer to find who they are. Your queerness, no matter how big or small, is what makes you you. These books helped me realize a lot about myself, and while the publishing industry may have a long ways to go before perfectly capturing queerness, I’m glad these books were written for teens like me.”
-Abbott S., 18, Texas
“My first LGBTQIAP+ book I read was Of Fire and Stars, by Audrey Coulthurst. I was probably in elementary school, and the ironic thing is, I didn’t even comprehend the girl/girl romance. I didn’t know what the word “gay” 
even meant until sixth grade. Looking back, I find it sad that my seemingly progressive parents didn’t find it necessary to explain to me that all girls didn’t have to like boys, or that all girls didn’t have to stay girls! Now, I am a non-binary bisexual who would like to spread the word to children about gender and sexuality. There are so many harmful connotations with the words gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, transgender, etc, and so many genders/sexual orientations that people don’t know about! I found out about the LGBTQIAP+ community through young adult literature, but that took a lot of searching. Some gems I have come across are We Set the Dark on Fire, Parrotfish, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, It’s not like its a secret, etc. I still wish there was more non-binary rep in YA lit, but thankfully there is also the internet to research topics like these. Most of my education in LGBTQIAP+ subjects come from literature, and I would like to thank all of the authors that write about these characters for letting me experience so many genders and orientations through the page.”
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (Balzer + Bray, 2015)
“I remembered questioning who I am, what I like and if what I’m feeling is right. I remembered thinking if I’m alone. I read books, but most of them are crime fiction and Miss Peregrine’s. Until I saw Simon Vs. on the shelf. I read the synopsis and I decided to buy it. I don’t know what I was expecting when I read it. I remembered laughing through the whole thing, crying with Simon and also started feeling the same thing he felt then, although I’m a girl. I decided then to take a break from mysteries and start picking up LGBTQ+ books to find out what’s with me. Somehow I started to feel like I’m connected to the characters until they helped me find out who I am. Not only that but LGBTQIAP+ YA books has taught me to write whatever stories I dare to write because it’s what the future generation needs, to not fear what others say to you. Now, I’m a happy pansexual with a beautiful girlfriend, and it’s because of LGBTQ+ YA. Words coming from the books I read helped me know who I am and told me to accept it, that people can’t do anything.”
On shelving–and unshelving–the book of my heart
by Rebecca Kim Wells
In 2015 I reached a major milestone in my writing career: I signed with a literary agent. The book I had written was a dark fairy tale-inspired YA fantasy, drenched with blood and magic and lies and quests. It was also a book featuring a queer main character and romantic relationship.
I saw no reason for this to be a problem. It was true that there weren’t that many queer YA books out there (especially not published by major US publishers), but there were some. Why couldn’t there be more? My agent, a fierce supporter of queer children’s books, had nothing but enthusiasm for my project. Together we spent several months revising this book and sent it on submission to publishers in the fall of 2015.
It’s not uncommon that a writer’s first book on submission fails to sell. Over the next several months we received kind rejection after kind rejection for this project, the sort that said, “I love the idea, didn’t quite connect with the main character,” or “The writing was great, but it’s too similar to something else on our list.” We got nice words, but nothing that told us anything about what might be wrong with the book, or what we could focus on in revision.
In early 2016, I had lunch with my agent. She (very kindly) suggested that it was time to shelve that book and write something else.
I was devastated. No matter how much experience you have in the publishing industry, rejection still hurts—and this was a big one. I shelved my book and spent months licking my wounds, but eventually, I picked myself up and started writing again. The next book I wrote, a YA fantasy about dragons and crumbling empires and secrets and one girl’s determination, sold to Simon & Schuster in 2018. Shatter the Sky, which was published last July, also features a queer main character and romantic relationship—in fact, it’s lovingly known around the internet as the “angry bisexual dragon YA fantasy novel.”
Last summer I was asked at a major bookseller conference how I feel about that angry bisexual tagline. I was lucky to be able to say with confidence that I feel great about it, and not just because I came up with it (lol). In my dealings with my publisher, S&S has always been supportive of my queer characters and stories. And I have sometimes been completely verklempt about how the book has been received—after the cover and first chapter reveal, I saw someone tweet that they were crying over the fact that two girls were kissing in the first chapter of a book published by a major publisher. Shatter the Sky is definitely not the first novel to do this, but I was overwhelmed that my writing brought joy to someone else seeking that representation.
Earlier this year, I had another lunch with my agent. We were gossiping about books we loved and talking career strategy, and my shelved book came up in conversation. And for the first time she told me that one of the imprints we’d submitted to in 2015 had told her that they weren’t sure the world was ready for the queer relationship in my YA book.
The world can change so much, so quickly. Sometimes it feels impossible. But it can.
I am so glad my agent didn’t tell me this at the time. Not only was it completely unhelpful information, it would also have devastated me even further and discouraged me from writing my next queer book. Instead, I got to hear about it five years (and three queer book contracts!) later, and laugh.
Because Simon & Schuster bought that 2015 book (after a revision I would not have been able to pull off five years ago). I am writing that book anew, and it is exhilarating. Next fall, you’ll get to read Of Blood and Briars (*working title!), a book I believed in too much to shelve permanently, and you’ll fall in love with my fierce (and fiercely disastrous) queer protagonist just as much as I have.
I am so lucky that my writing career has already had so many moments of queer bookish joy. But selling this queer book of my heart (five years later!) is one of the most satisfying. I can’t wait to share it with you.
—
Rebecca Kim Wells grew up in California before moving east in search of crisp autumns and snowy winters. Her debut novel Shatter the Sky was a New England Book Award Finalist, an Indies Introduce selection, and a Kids’ Indie Next Pick. She is also the author of Storm the Earth (October 2020) and Of Blood and Briars (2021), published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. She holds a BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Simmons College. When not writing, reading, or talking about writing or reading, she sells books at a fiercely independent bookstore in Massachusetts. She can also be found drinking tea, singing along to musicals, or playing soccer. (Usually not all at once.) If she were a hobbit, she would undoubtedly be a Took.
Rebecca is represented by Rebecca Podos at the Rees Literary Agency.
Writing Your Way Out Of The Closet
by Abdi Nazemian
Many years ago, after my first book – an adult gay novel called The Walk-In Closet was published – a wonderful and open-minded Iranian therapist hosted a book club at her home. The attendees were largely Iranians of my parents’ generation. They all dressed for the event like it was an awards show. It was very formal. And I was very afraid. Because up until then, I had largely been hiding my queerness from my cultural community. Or maybe the right way to put it is that they had been choosing not to see it. And now I had written a novel that featured an Iranian gay man as a lead character, and I was sitting in front of the community that had made me feel so marginalized as a kid. I was making them see my queerness, because it was right there on the page. One of the first questions was asked by a man about my dad’s age. “Why do you need parades?” he asked. “Why can’t you just be gay in private?”
Let me rewind the story a little bit now. If you’ve read my most recent novel, Like a Love Story, you know a little about the shame and fear I carried in my early life. If you haven’t, I’ll fill in some key details. I was born in Iran, a country where being gay is currently punishable by death. And the Iranian diaspora who left Iran took some of that homophobia with them. Growing up, I spoke a language with no word for being gay that wasn’t a slur. And I heard a constant stream of homophobia from members of my cultural community. Add to that the fact that AIDS was ravaging the gay community for my childhood and teen years. I knew I was gay from a very early age, but I always felt that coming out would both shame my family and be a death sentence. Not a great recipe for coming out.
By high school and college, I was living in the United States and was lucky enough to find teachers and mentors who exposed me to queer films and books. One of the most impactful was a documentary called The Times of Harvey Milk. His most famous quote has always stuck with me: “Gay brothers and sisters,…You must come out. Come out… to your parents… I know that it is hard and will hurt them but think about how they will hurt you in the voting booth. Come out to your relatives… come out to your friends… if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors… to your fellow workers… to the people who work where you eat and shop… come out only to the people you know, and who know you. Not to anyone else. But once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions.”
But coming out when I was young wasn’t easy, because what I discovered – as the quote implies- is that I had to come out again and again and again. I had to come out to multiple people, and sometimes to the same people more than once because they refused to accept and see my queerness.
Let’s fast forward again. After graduating college, I decided to move to Los Angeles with my best friend. I got a job as an assistant to a producer and other than answering phones all day, my biggest responsibility was reading all the scripts she was sent. Dozens a week. After about a year of this, I convinced a friend that we could write a script together. We did, and we stumbled into a career writing movies that felt like a miracle. But I had one big frustration. When I tried to put personal things into these scripts, they never got made. I was told to cut every gay character from one script. I was asked if I would consider making an Iranian family white to make the roles more castable.
That’s when I had an a-ha moment. If I wrote a book, then nobody could tell me they needed it to be castable, or that they needed millions of dollars to finance it. It was out of this need to tell my story that The Walk-In Closet was born. But the story had a lot more roadblocks than I imagined. The book was rejected by every major publisher. The feedback was generally positive, but publishers seemed confused by what the book was. They all told me the book wasn’t enough of something. Not gay enough. Not literary enough. I gave up on it, and the book sat on a shelf for a very long time.
When I had my kids, my writing career was at its lowest point. The one-two punch of the Hollywood writers’ strike and the recession had largely put an end to the kind of script deals I was getting. My writing partner and I parted ways professionally. My book had been rejected everywhere. And I had two kids to take care of. I chose to do what I once thought unthinkable: I made my Iranian dad’s dreams come true by going to business school. Every other weekend for two years, I studied statistics and finance and accounting. I was fully prepared to stop writing and find another path to survival. But a funny thing happened in those two years of business school. In classes about marketing and branding, I started to see a new path forward for myself as a writer in which I took control, instead of waiting for publishers and studio executives to validate me. I started to rewrite The Walk-In Closet, and I plotted a way to self-publish.
When I called my book agent and told him I had put the wheels in motion to self-publish The Walk-In Closet, he surprised me by saying that the agency could help with this. They had started an imprint to help authors put books out. They wouldn’t be able to pay me, or to market the book, but they could guide me, handle distribution, support the process of designing a cover and copy editing. By taking control of my own narrative, I had started a process that resulted in the book being published at last.
When the book came out, I felt like I could stop finally stop coming out. Because once my queerness was on the page, it couldn’t be ignored.
Now let’s get back to where this story began. With the man who asked me, “Why do you need parades? Why can’t you just be gay in private?” Every queer person will have their own answer to this question. For me, existing in a closet is a toxic experience. The reason I celebrate gay pride is because for so long, I felt no one was proud of me. To voice your pride publicly, and to be surrounded by a community that shares and supports that pride, is a deeply healing experience. And my way of stating that pride has been writing.
The Walk-In Closet, which wasn’t gay enough or literary enough for publishers, found an audience. It won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Debut. It inspired me to write my first YA novel The Authentics. And then another, Like a Love Story, by far my most personal book and my favorite of all my books. Three books in, I’m still learning how to peel off the walls that once kept me safe from feeling vulnerable and seen.
I often get asked for writing advice by young people, and my first advice is always a version of Harvey Milk’s. Come out on the page, whatever that means to you. Write honestly about all those things people have told you to keep in a closet. Because that’s what makes you special. Because when you celebrate your own pride, you’re inviting a whole community of people to celebrate that pride with you.
—
Abdi Nazemian is the author of three novels. His first, The Walk-In Closet, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Debut Fiction. His most recent, Like a Love Story, an Indie Next Pick, Walden Finalist, and Junior Library Guild selection, was awarded a Stonewall Honor, and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible, Buzzfeed, the New York Public Library and more. His screenwriting credits include the films The Artist’s Wife, The Quiet, and Menendez: Blood Brothers, and the television series The Village and Almost Family. He has been an executive producer and associate producer on numerous films, including Call Me By Your Name, Little Woods, and Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband and two children.
When Queer Books Lead to Queer BFFs
Today! Aug 18th, 6:00 pm.
by Kelly Quindlen
Three years ago, when I was going through a rough patch, my parents gave me some advice. “We think you need queer friends,” my dad said. “Have you considered a gay cruise?”
I laughed out loud when he suggested it, but I knew the larger point was true: I was starving for friends who reflected my queerness back to me. I have some amazing friends, but they are overwhelmingly straight and cis. This is not their fault. We can’t all be blessed with queerness. But the point is, I had no one to confide in who would simply get it because they were living it. I was anemic in this part of my life. Gay-nemic, I guess you could say.
It’s not that I hadn’t tried. I’d gone to gay bars, Pride parades, even a church that was LGBT-inclusive. I hung out with other queer people in these spaces, but I felt like I had to contort myself to make it work. I’m not into going out and partying. I’m not into glitter bombs at Pride. Those things are wonderful, but they’re not me. I’m a stay-home-and-read kind of gay. My queer oxygen comes from stories.
So it only makes sense that I finally, finally found my queer best friends through books.
Adrienne came into my life through Twitter. She DM’d me to express how much she liked my first book, and we built a slow, steady friendship around reading and writing. We traded book recs. We swapped WIPs. We signed with literary agents within a few months of each other and emailed about it immediately. But it was always a loose, colleague-like friendship. We knew bits and pieces of each other’s lives, but mostly we compared notes about the industry.
Then, last summer, I gay-writer-friend-proposed: Did she want to be a PitchWars mentor with me?
Adrienne said yes. We built a wish list around queerness and queerness and more queerness, with a bit of mental health thrown in (because if you’re not grappling with anxiety and depression, are you truly even A Gay?). We texted and emailed more than usual. We got very, very excited for PitchWars submissions to open up.
Then, on the day we received our 81 mentee submissions, I impulsively called her on the phone. I was too damn excited to wait for texts. Adrienne picked up and we heard each other’s voices for the first time. And we squealed. Adrienne mentioned that her fiancée, Katie, was in the background, laughing in amusement. I had never had a female-identifying friend with a fiancée—two e’s—before! I was so, so happy.
It got even better. Of all the submissions we read, there was one that jumped out at us. The author was a queer girl I’d stumbled across on Twitter because she’d written a beautiful, poignant essay about her interfaith, interracial, totally fucking queer New Hampshire wedding. Her manuscript—about a queer girl grappling with depression at the literal end of the world—grabbed my heart and wouldn’t let go. Adrienne felt the same way. We knew we had to work with her.
On the night we finally spoke with Jen on the phone, it was like magic swirled around my apartment. We talked for hours. About Jen’s manuscript, Adrienne’s book, my book, coming out, kissing women for the first time, Jen’s wedding, Adrienne’s upcoming wedding, my then-relationship, past break-ups, mental health struggles, and how our queerness was a through-line beneath all of these things. Talking to them felt like home.
A few weeks later, I traveled to Chicago for a previously-planned visit with my sister. The Gay Goddess obviously had a hand in that plan, because Chicago just happens to be where Jen and her wife, Krupa, live. We met at a Mexican restaurant with a big group of my sister’s friends and drank margaritas at the far end of the table, the only three queer people present. It was like being in our own world. It was perfect. Two weeks later, I flew to New York to meet Adrienne for the first time. The occasion? Her fabulous, sapphic-AF wedding. Our first hug was at a bar in Brooklyn the night before she said I Do. We squealed just like we had on the phone the first time. She introduced me to her fiancée, Katie, and her mom and family. We drank whiskey because of course we did.
The next day, I went to my first queer wedding: Adrienne and Katie’s. They held it at Ssam Bar in the East Village. I took my cousin as my date, and she cried her straight little heart out during the vows. Adrienne’s opening line was, “Before I met Katie, I drank vodka.” My heart swelled because this was my friend and she was so funny and so smart and she was marrying another beautiful woman and she invited me to witness it. By the end of the night, my cheeks hurt from smiling. It was one of the best weddings I’ve ever been to.
It’s been six months since that night at Ssam Bar, and the world looks a lot different, but our friendship is one of the touchstones getting me through. We conquered PitchWars and Jen signed with her perfect-fit agent. Adrienne and I sent her a custom T-shirt with her characters’ names listed down the front. We knew she had received it when she texted us with, “I’m going to kill you two.” Together, the three of us have finished manuscripts, traded manuscripts, and sold manuscripts. We’ve texted dozens of book recommendations. We’ve FaceTimed late at night to make sense of my breakup, but also to laugh our asses off and share “happy hour” from hundreds of miles away.
In April, my traditional debut, Late to the Party, released. People in book world talk a lot about debut anxiety, but for me it manifested differently: I spent a huge portion of 2018 and 2019 worrying that, as I entered the book industry, I would never find the kinds of writer friends I needed by my side. I literally wrote a prayer in my journal asking for one or two good writing friends with whom I could share my authentic, vulnerable, imperfect self.
The prayer obviously worked…and then some. Through Adrienne, there was Kiki; through Jen, Jasmyne. And now there’s Meryl and Leah and Adiba and Ray. Every day, there are more and more of us bringing our queer books into the world. So even though I can’t go to any in-person Pride celebrations this year, I am happier and more confident in my queerness than ever, because I finally feel like I’m part of a community. Books did that. Stories did that. Queer stories did that. We’re just getting started.
—
Kelly Quindlen is the author of the young adult novels Late to the Party and Her Name in the Sky. A graduate of Vanderbilt University and a former teacher, Kelly has had the joy of speaking to PFLAG groups and high school GSAs. She currently serves on the leadership board of a non-profit for Catholic parents with LGBT children. She lives in Atlanta. Follow her on Twitter @kellyquindlen.
The Path to Publication: Writing the Queer Black Girls of Cinderella Is Dead
by Kalynn Bayron
I’ve always been a fan of genre fiction. From horror to fantasy to sci-fi. I love all things magical and atmospheric and bone chilling. I’m a writer because I was a reader, first. In those stories I found ghosts, mythical creatures, people with impossible powers, aliens, orcs, fairies, elves, kings and queens. What I didn’t see was Black people or queer people. Until I discovered Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler I didn’t see Black women centered and I didn’t see queer people being treated with care and concern, in any of the stories I loved so much.
I wrote Cinderella Is Dead, a YA fantasy that centers queer Black girls, because I wanted to add to a growing list of fantasies that center Black queer women. I felt like it was the story I wanted and needed to tell and I hoped that the story, the characters, and the setting would be compelling enough to snag an agent. What I didn’t fully anticipate was how difficult the road to publication would be.
But let me take things back to 2016. Over the course of about eight months in the early part of that year, I drafted Cinderella Is Dead, a YA fantasy that takes place in the fictional kingdom of Mersailles. Its capital city, Lille, is the place where Cinderella lived and died almost 200 years prior. The society that has developed there relies on her story as a guide. I’ve always been fascinated by fairytales and the affect they have on who we become. Cinderella is one of the most instantly recognizable fairytales with very recognizable villains—the evil step sisters and evil stepmother. My first question whenever I hear a story about villainous women is always this—who is telling this story? Because history is written by the victors. And Cinderella isn’t a historical tale… but what if it was? And what if there was a deeply unsettling reason for telling stories this way? Telling this story, set within this already established framework was the perfect place for my characters to address those questions. I thought I had something really special, something meaningful.
I shared a few chapters with a writer’s group I was a part of and realized immediately that placing a queer Black girl at the center of a YA fantasy, as the heroine, was going to bring about a level of criticism–and racism with a sprinkle of homophobia masquerading as critique–that would test my patience and my resolve to do whatever I could to provide LGBTQIA+ youth with as many choices as their cis, straight peers. I was told to my face that readers wouldn’t want this story and that it wasn’t “mainstream” enough to catch the attention of agents or editors. The people in this group told me that if I wanted to be traditionally published, my Black queer girls should be side characters or villains and that my main character should be “a normal girl” because that’s what would sell and that’s what readers wanted to see. I don’t know if there’s a word to fully describe the level of rage I felt. What I said to the people in that group before I left is between me and Black Jesus.
Sitting at home, stewing in my anger about the situation, I came to the understanding that at least some of what they said was true. Publishing is very white, very cis, and very straight. And I saw that reflected in the titles that dominated the YA section of the bookstore. It certainly looked like publishing didn’t want stories like the one I was writing. But I had to stop and ask myself who I was writing for. Was it for the gatekeepers or was it for myself and for readers who, just like me, wanted to see themselves reflected? Going back to the foundation, the reason I started writing the novel in the first place, gave me the answer.
I write for us. Always.
So, I went back to work–polished the manuscript I’d titled Cinderella Is Dead, kept all my main characters Black and Queer, and jumped into the query trenches with both feet. I do what I want. You know what else I do? Cry. Because querying is hard. Querying a reimagining of Cinderella was tough because the feedback I was getting initially was that the YA market was oversaturated with retellings/reimaginings. It had been done to death and just wasn’t something anyone was really looking for. It’s not standard practice to reply to an agent at all, much less with the question, “How many of those reimaginings center BIPOC? And how many of them are also queer?”. I had to, for the millionth time in my life, find a way to navigate a space in which intersectional identities were actively erased. I changed up my query letter after the first few rejections to try and stress the fact that there were nowhere near enough stories featuring queer Black main characters. Trying to convince people that you deserve a seat at the table is rage inducing when the response is “it just didn’t resonate with me.” Oh no? What about the young Black girl who might read this and feel seen? What about the queer girls who want their happily ever after? I get it. You gotta love what you represent but maybe ask yourself why you don’t love a story unless it’s about people who look, and love, like you. Any-hoo…after about 70-ish queries and lots of tears, I had requests for 15 partials and 5 fulls. I signed with my agent, Jamie, in February of 2017 and it’s no surprise that my literary agency is called Rainbow Nerds Literary. It took other queer professionals to get my story out there. It’s a sobering reminder of why we need more representation not just in the pages of books but in the industry that produces those books.
So boom. I got an agent and all my worries were over. LOL. No. My agent and I revised Cinderella again and eventually went on submission in mid-2017. We started with 8 editors. By September we’d gotten passes from 6. So we stopped and I had a moment where the words of all those Karens and Brads from that horrible writer’s group echoed in my head. I was worried that I’d never be able to sell a book because I never envisioned writing characters that didn’t reflect the intersectional identities of not only myself, but of so many of the people I know and love. That didn’t sit right with me, and again, I went back to the reason I wrote the book in the first place. I pulled myself out of my funk, talked to the ancestors, and went back to work. Jamie and I worked through another round of revisions. We tore the manuscript apart and put it back together again and didn’t go back on sub until April of 2018. In June we got an email from Bloomsbury and after a revision in which I changed a 90k word manuscript from past tense to present tense, we got an offer! Cinderella Is Dead will be published July 7th, 2020.
The road to publication has been a series of ups and downs. The joys of getting “the call”, getting the deal, clicking with my editor and the team at Bloomsbury who have championed this book, seeing my cover for the first time, having authors I respect and admire reach out to me with their support and encouragement has been a dream come true. But this journey has not been without its lows. I’m still learning how to deal with people in my DMs telling me that “Cinderella was white” and that two teenage girls exploring a romantic relationship “isn’t appropriate”. I’m still deciding what level of rage is appropriate in a professional setting when I’m told my path to getting published must have been easier because publishing is “really into diversity right now”. It’s disappointing but not unexpected.
But here’s the thing. After all of it, I’m here. I finished this story and it’s out in the world, finding its way to readers who will make it their own. No matter what happens from here on out, those facts will always be true.
We belong here. We always have. Our work has always been worthy. I feel humbled and incredibly excited to be able to share this story with everyone.
—
