I’m so excited about this month’s featured new release, the Proud anthology edited by Juno Dawson! Yes, this is UK YA, but thanks to Book Depository, you can buy it in the US as well! Not only are the stories in this collection wonderful and adorable and full of glorious representation all over the LGBTQ spectrum, but it’s also got stunning illustrations created especially for each story.
The authors have been kind enough to share a little more information on their stories, so read on to learn more about the book and it’s awesome contents!
A stirring, bold and moving anthology of stories and poetry by top LGBTQ+ YA authors and new talent, giving their unique responses to the broad theme of pride. Each story has an illustration by an artist identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community. Compiled by Juno Dawson, author of THIS BOOK IS GAY and CLEAN.
A celebration of LGBTQ+ talent, PROUD is a thought-provoking, funny, emotional read.
Contributors: Steve Antony, Dean Atta, Kate Alizadeh, Fox Benwell, Alex Bertie, Caroline Bird, Fatti Burke, Tanya Byrne, Moïra Fowley-Doyle, Frank Duffy, Simon James Green, Leo Greenfield, Saffa Khan, Karen Lawler, David Levithan, Priyanka Meenakshi, Alice Oseman, Michael Lee Richardson, David Roberts, Cynthia So, Kay Staples, Jessica Vallance, Kristen Van Dam and Kameron White.
Buy it: Amazon UK | Waterstones | Book Depository
“The Courage of Dragons” by Fox Benwell
The Courage of Dragons was born out of necessity, in that sometimes being proud is a process: a constant, political, active thing, and sometimes being brave enough for that is hard. Figuring yourself out, fighting archaic and terrible systems and virulent media, and finding somewhere you belong: all hard. The trials of proper swords-and-honour heroes.
We all know what it’s like to wish we were those heroes, that we could go around righting awful wrongs and saving hapless princes in our own everyday lives, and that got me to thinking: what if you could borrow some of that spirit and – together with a band of faithful friends – fix some of the stuff society has broken?
Dragons is that story. It’s a tribute to the power of legend and imagination and belief, and friendship (because honestly, without my own D&D party and the friends within it I’d be lost and lonely somewhere in the mines).
My story is a chorus of voices from LGBTQ+ teens. When I set out to write it, I knew that it was going to involve a young member of a gay men’s chorus…but many different voices tell their stories – all louder together than apart. Stylistically, the typesetting (especially indentation) is VERY important here. Imagine a crescendo of perspectives all clamouring to be heard.
“Dive Bar” by Caroline Bird
The poem is all about finding the pride to come out. So many old gay clubs had to be underground, down steep flights of stairs into windowless cellars. The gateways club in Euston for example: (The club was described as having a green door with a steep staircase leading down to a windowless cellar bar) And this secrecy has a sexiness to it and an exciting clandestine feeling to it… but it’s also a trap, we were literally driven underground… swallowed under the city.
The poem is a process of being driven deeper and deeper underground both in society and inside yourself – Your Secret’s Safe with me/ your secret’s in a safe/ your secret is yourself – and then suddenly realising you can’t breathe, you can’t be illicit, you can’t be forbidden you have to overcome these ‘dead laws’ and run up the stairs out into the open … into the sunlight…
Pride is difficult. It’s scary. Especially when you’re young. That is why I didn’t want to patronise the reader by pretending like it’s easy to be yourself… often the process of finding yourself is preceded by a long stint of self-denial and burial and suppression until you’re finally so suffocated, so ‘windowless’ that you need to break down those walls in yourself and escape…
Dive Bar is a celebration of self-exploration, of the kinds of dim lit bars that are the places where the Pride movement was dreamt up in.
“Almost Certain” by Tanya Byrne
When Juno approached me to write something for PROUD, I knew that I wanted to set it in Brighton. People travel from all over the country for Brighton Pride because they know that they will be safe – and welcome – here. ALMOST CERTAIN was supposed to be a celebration of that, but as I began to write it, I couldn’t help but reminisce on my own experiences as a teenager. I didn’t come out until I was 40 and I’ve often wondered if I would have come out sooner if I had lived somewhere like Brighton, but what if I didn’t? What if all those reasons I didn’t come out – fear that it was just a phase and I’d change my mind, fear that my friends and family wouldn’t accept me, fear that someone would hurt me – were still there despite living in a town that is so accepting of the LGBTQ community. That’s how Orla’s story came about, because I know there are teenagers like her, not just in Brighton, but around the world, who are scared and confused and need to know that it’s okay to not know who they are yet. ALMOST CERTAIN is the story I needed to read when I was sixteen and if a teenager like Orla finds it, I hope it makes them feel less alone.
“Penguins” by Simon James Green
I felt like everywhere I looked, I was seeing gay penguins. There were some at an aquarium in Sydney; a pair from a Danish zoo who ‘kidnapped’ a chick from a neglectful straight couple, and, of course, Roy and Silo at Central Park Zoo, who famously inspired the picture book, AND TANGO MAKES THREE. In each case, there was a serious amount of media attention – people were fascinated. Two things occurred to me. First, what must it be like if you’re a teen, all set to come out, only to find everyone’s more interested in some gay penguins who have beaten you to it? Second, boys going to Prom in their black and white tuxes look a bit like penguins. Combining the two was irresistible.
“Love Poems to the City” by Moïra Fowley-Doyle
In the patchwork of any story, a couple of scraps are always taken from your own life. Sometimes you put them there on purpose, sometimes they kind of just get stitched in by accident and you only realise it once the quilt is made. Love Poems to the City ended up being a patchwork heavily influenced by a particular time in my life.
When I was asked to write a story on the theme of pride, two very specific things were happening in my life side by side. I was campaigning for the referendum to repeal the 8th amendment, so everything was posters and placards lashed to lampposts, handing out fliers and YES badges. And my marriage was ending, so I was having a lot of feelings about love and marriage. I didn’t set out to write a story about two teen girls with divorced parents campaigning for the 2015 equal marriage referendum, but it’s what my subconscious came up with.
During the marriage referendum my old secondary school (which was the first school in Ireland to set up an LGBT group for students) made the news because, in answer to the scores of NO posters on the road outside, students painted a rainbow across the main gates. I don’t know who painted it or what their stories were, but that rainbow got stitched into my patchwork. I wanted to write about pride in community and pride in activism. I wanted to write about love for a city and a city that speaks back. And I wanted to write about that rainbow.
“I Hate Darcy Pemberley” by Karen Lawler
I’ve always loved retellings – Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You are two of my absolute favourites – and I’m a HUGE sucker for a lesbian romcom. So when I saw the prompt for Proud, which asked for a response to the theme of pride, the first thing that popped into my head was Pride and Prejudice. It’s always struck me that today the surname Darcy is commonly used as a girls first name, especially in the States, so I was off.
I had a lot of fun with little P&P Easter eggs – Pemberley is my Darcy’s surname because that was the name of Darcy’s estate in Austin’s book – and some elements of the book had to stay. Wickham is still the worst; Jane is still too nice for her own good. But I had a lot of fun reimagining other bits, especially Lydia, who I always felt got a bit of a short shrift in Austin’s novel, and for all her faults deserved better than to be married to Wickham. And of course the most important thing is still there: the hilarious, pride-filled romance between Lizzie and Darcy.
“The Other Team” by Michael Lee Richardson
My story ‘The Other Team’ is about a queer football team rallying around their trans star player.
When I was trying to come up with stories for Proud, I realised pretty quickly that I wanted to write something about friendship. There are lots of LGBTQI+ stories about love and romance and relationships, and those are great, but not as many about queer friendships, and those are really important to me.
I work with LGBTQI+ young people, and – despite knowing next to nothing about sport! – I’ve somehow found myself working for a sports organisation. I’ve taken lots of young people on day trips and weekends away to a play sport, and a lot of those experiences went into the story.
Working for a sports organisation, I realise how many issues there still are for LGBTQI+ people in sport, and I wanted to make sure the story stayed true to them.
I really wanted to get over the feeling of the pride you can feel, being part of a team – even when things aren’t going well! – and how important it is to feel like part of something.
“The Phoenix’s Fault” by Cynthia So
If you go to a Chinese wedding, you might see a picture of a dragon and a phoenix. It’s a popular symbol of a harmonious, heterosexual marriage—the dragon represents the man, and the phoenix the woman. Growing up in Hong Kong, even if I don’t really remember ever going to a wedding, I still saw this symbol around. Big Chinese restaurants there usually have a wall with a massive dragon and a massive phoenix on it to serve as the backdrop for wedding banquets.
When I was fifteen, I wrote a poem called “defying tradition” that ends “I will stand as a traitor, / not in between the phoenix and the dragon, / but next to a woman who, / like me, / seeks a phoenix to match her own”. I’ve always wanted to expand on the ideas that I touched on in that poem, about the heternormative expectations that these two mythical beasts represent in Chinese culture. So when I saw that the theme for this anthology was pride, the dragon and the phoenix immediately came to mind. They’re proud creatures, after all. I was thinking too of the pride that many parents feel when their children get married, and other ways someone might be able to make their family proud. So I wrote “The Phoenix’s Fault”, set in a world in which phoenixes and dragons are real, to see how a girl who has a pet phoenix might respond to these expectations that are placed upon her shoulders. What does she do when having a pet phoenix seems to destine her for marriage to the Emperor, but her heart wants something—someone—else?
“On The Run” by Kay Staples
‘On the Run’ is about two queer kids who have the chance to run away together and be themselves. It’s especially important for protagonist Nicky, who’s trying to figure out if he, or she, or they, are trans or not.
Uncertainty is what I really wanted to write about, since it’s something that marks adolescence for a lot of LGBTQ+ people. We take some time to work ourselves out, and all the while we’re being told that our orientation, gender, or gender presentation might be something shameful – and pride is the antithesis to that.
So, I came to this theme with the idea that you can be proud of who you are even if you aren’t sure who that is yet. Things will be okay whatever the answer is, just like they will be for Nicky and Dean.
“The Instructor” by Jess Vallance
When I was thinking about the theme of pride, I tried to work out what my own proudest achievement was and I realised it was probably passing my driving test! It took me two years and six tests. The idea of driving lessons as the backdrop of the story really appealed to me – I’ve always liked stories with small casts of characters with the bulk of the story covered as dialogue between them.
I also wanted to write something about the pain of relationships where the same-sex element is largely irrelevant to the confusion. The story is about the difficulties of working out what you mean to another person, when to speak up and what happens after you have – things that no one ever can be sure they’re getting right, whatever the gender of the people involved.
In the former United States, sixteen-year-old Noam Álvaro wakes up in a hospital bed, the sole survivor of the viral magic that killed his family and made him a technopath. His ability to control technology attracts the attention of the minister of defense and thrusts him into the magical elite of the nation of Carolinia.
A high-stakes survival story about eight teenagers who outlive an alien attack—perfect for fans of The 5th Wave 
A stunning psychological thriller about loss, sisterhood, and the evil that men do, for readers of Ruth Ware and S.K. Tremeyne
A transgender reporter’s narrative tour through the surprisingly vibrant queer communities sprouting up in red states, offering a vision of a stronger, more humane America.
This is the second book in the Alice Payne series
By day, Mary Ballard is lady’s maid to Charlotte Walden, wealthy and accomplished belle of New York City high society. Mary loves Charlotte with an obsessive passion that goes beyond a servant’s devotion, but Charlotte would never trust Mary again if she knew the truth about her devoted servant’s past. Because Mary’s fate is linked to that of her mistress, one of the most sought-after debutantes in New York, Mary’s future seems secure—if she can keep her own secrets…
A stirring, bold and moving anthology of stories and poetry by top LGBTQ+ YA authors and new talent, giving their unique responses to the broad theme of pride. Each story has an illustration by an artist identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community. Compiled by Juno Dawson, author of THIS BOOK IS GAY and CLEAN.
Besotted is the ballad of Sasha and Liz, American expats in Shanghai. Both have moved abroad to escape—Sasha from her father’s disapproval, Liz from the predictability of her hometown. When they move in together, Sasha falls in love, but the sudden attention from a charming architect threatens the relationship. Meanwhile, Liz struggles to be both a good girlfriend to Sasha and a good friend to Sam, her Shanghainese language partner who needs more from her than grammar lessons. For fans of Prague by Arthur Phillips and The Expatriates by Janice Y.K. Lee, Besotted is an expat novel that explores what it means to love someone while running away from yourself.
In a chronicle of mourning and survival, Ali Liebegott wallows in loneliness and overassigns meaning to everyday circumstance, clinging to an aging dog and obsessing over dead birds. But these unpretentious vignettes are laced with compassion, as she learns to balance the sting of death with the tender strangeness of life.
This darkly comic debut novel by an award-winning playwright is like Mean Girls meets Heathers with a splash of Bring it On.
Mads is pretty happy with her life. She goes to church with her family, and minor league baseball games with her dad. She goofs off with her best friend Cat, and has thus far managed to avoid getting kissed by Adam, the boy next door. It’s everything she hoped high school would be… until all of a sudden, it’s not.
Eight hundred years ago, the Zhen Empire discovered a broken human colony ship drifting in the fringes of their space. The Zhen gave the humans a place to live and folded them into their Empire as a client state. But it hasn’t been easy. Not all Zhen were eager to welcome another species into their Empire, and humans have faced persecution. For hundreds of years, human languages and history were outlawed subjects, as the Zhen tried to mold humans into their image. Earth and the cultures it nourished for millennia are forgotten, little more than legends.
Ryann Bird dreams of traveling across the stars. But a career in space isn’t an option for a girl who lives in a trailer park on the wrong side of town. So Ryann becomes her circumstances and settles for acting out and skipping school to hang out with her delinquent friends.
While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can—and should—be read queerly. 
Divine justice is written in blood.
Rule #1 – Never fall for a summer boy. 
Things are going great for Sutton Kay, or at least they were. Her yoga studio is doing well, she’s living with her best friend, and she just got two kittens named Mocha and Cappuccino. Sure, she doesn’t have a girlfriend, but her life is full and busy.
In the city of Houston – a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America – the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He’s working at his family’s restaurant, weathering his brother’s blows, resenting his older sister’s absence. And discovering he likes boys.
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden’s raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.
I’ve been chased my whole life. As an illegal immigrant in the territory controlled by the tyrannical Mercer corporation, I’ve always had to hide who I am. Until I found Excalibur.
When genderqueer fourteen-year-old Z Chilworth wakes from death after a car crash that killed their parents and sisters, they have to adjust quickly to their new status as a zombie. Always a talented witch, Z can now barely perform magic and is rapidly decaying. Faced with rejection from their remaining family members and old friends, Z moves in with Mrs. Dunnigan, an elderly witch, and befriends Aysel, a loud would-be-goth classmate who is, like Z, a loner. As Z struggles to find a way to repair the broken magical seal holding their body together, Aysel fears that her classmates will discover her status as an unregistered werewolf. When a local psychiatrist is murdered in an apparent werewolf attack, the town of Salem, Oregon, becomes even more hostile to monsters, and Z and Aysel are driven together in an attempt to survive a place where most people wish that neither of them existed.
With Miranda in Milan, debut author Katharine Duckett reimagines the consequences of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, casting Miranda into a Milanese pit of vipers and building a queer love story that lifts off the page in whirlwinds of feeling.