There are so many amazing Trans, Nonbinary and Gender Non-Conforming authors who are either from or now live in the San Francisco Bay Area. For Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31, I wanted to highlight some of these fantastic authors. These authors range from writing Teen Fantasy/Science Fiction to Adult Nonfiction about so many different topics. They are also activists, professors, columnists, podcast hosts, book reviewers, translators and so many amazing things.
Trans people have faced so much adversity for so long and they deserve to be seen as they are, successful, creative and so much more than just being trans. In the face of so much hate, they are standing strong and being true to themselves. They have been an inspiration to me and highlighting them is a small thing, but something I see as so vital right now.
These recent attacks on the trans community have been terrible, but I have seen the strength and the resilience they have, and they will continue to have. Trans rights are human rights and fighting for them is fighting for all of us.
Aiden Thomas is a trans, Latinx, New York Times Bestselling Author with an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Originally from Oakland, California, they now make their home in Portland, OR. Aiden is notorious for not being able to guess the endings of books and movies and organizes their bookshelves by color.
Aiden is the author of many books for teens, Cemetery Boys and its forthcoming sequel, Espiritu, Lost in the Never Woods, the two books in The Sunbearer duology, The Sunbearer Trials and Celestial Monsters.
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She grew up in Connecticut and now lives in the Bay Area.
She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
The City in the Middle of the Night
Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of three novels: The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. Newitz grew up in Irvine, California and now lives in the Bay Area.
As a science journalist, they are the author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science.
They are a writer for the New York Times and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Scientific American, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and Technology Review, among others. They are the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.
A writer of Uruguayan origins, Caro De Robertis is the author of So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color, The Palace of Eros, The President and the Frog, Cantoras, The Gods of Tango, Perla; and the international bestseller The Invisible Mountain.
De Robertis is also an award-winning translator of Latin American literature, and editor of the anthology Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times. In 2017, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts named De Robertis on its 100 List of “people, organizations, and movements that are shaping the future of culture.” De Robertis is a professor at San Francisco State University, and lives in Oakland, California with their two children.
Kyle Casey Chu (AKA Panda Dulce) is a writer/producer and one of the founding queens of Drag Story Hour. She was born and raised in San Francisco.
In June 2022, far-right extremists stormed her Drag Story Hour to silence her. She is now leveraging her global platform to tell even gayer stories.
Kyle's work has been featured on Vogue, NPR, HuffPost, VICE, at SXSW, Harvard & MIT's Broad Institute and more. Her screenplays have received awards from Sundance, SFFILM, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the California Arts Council, WeScreenplay, Industrial Scripts' TITAN Awards (UK), Lambda Literary and SF Indie Film Festival, and more. She created, produced and starred in the all-QTPOC web series: CHOSEN FAM.
Her debut two-novel middle grade series, The Queen Bees of Tybee County was just optioned by Lambur Productions into a UK episodic.
THE QUEEN BEES OF TYBEE COUNTY
Vera Blossom
Vera Blossom is a proud Filipina American and transfemme monster. She was born in the Bay Area, raised in Las Vegas and now lives in Chicago.
Her work explores desire, pleasure, gender, and death. She writes the steamy, confessional newsletter How to Fuck Like a Girl, and cofounded Snack Report, a food blog focused on rituals, feelings, and friendship. In 2021, she helped produce Black Mountain Radio, an artist-driven audio project published in collaboration with Black Mountain Institute and the Believer magazine. In 2022, she was associate producer on season 2 of The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, which focused on the disinformation ecosystem constructed by the Christian Nationalist movement. In 2023, she was selected as an Ann Friedman Weekly Fellow and a PEN America Emerging Voice.
Lio Min is the acclaimed author of Beating Heart Baby, a longtime music reporter, a MacDowell fellow, and a fullmetal optimist. The L.O.V.E. Club is their second novel. Min lives in Oakland, California, and writes toward the future.
Susan O'Neal Stryker is an American professor, historian, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is a professor of Gender and Women's Studies, former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona. Stryker is the author of several books and a founding figure of transgender studies as well as a leading scholar of transgender history.
Sarah Gailey is an American author of fantasy, science fiction, and mystery novels, short stories, and comics. Gailey is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, and as of 2019, lives in Los Angeles.
Gailey's fiction has been published in The Atlantic, Tor.com, and Fireside Magazine. Their non-fiction writing has appeared on Tor.com, Mashable, The Boston Globe and Uncanny Magazine. Gailey first became well known for their 2017 American Hippo duology, consisting of the novellas River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow. Upright Woman Wanted, a standalone novella, was published in February 2020.
Their novels include Magic for Liars, When We Were Magic, The Echo Wife and Just Like Home.
Contributed by Emily Strempek
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