Our mission is simple: we take risks on authors dedicated to social and personal change, authors who seek to shift boundaries with their words.
The books listed below are but a small sample of the unconventional writings we offer at Aunt Lute Books. Donate to our nonprofit multicultural women’s press this Give OUT Day and help support our mission to bring revolutionary women to the forefront of literature.
This is basically the Radical Women of Color Starter Pack. Writings by bell hooks, Sandra Cisneros, Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alice Walker, Jewelle Gomez AND June Jordan are all in the same book. How is this even real?!
“Strange things happen when you’re an unknown Choctaw author on a US book tour. Sure some people say stupid things like, I thought all the Chock Toes were dead.’…While hearing such remarks is somewhat painful, there’s no limit to the amount of fun you can have with the people who make them. They become part of the extraordinary events you will want to scribble down and savor.”
—LeAnne Howe, from Choctalking on Other Realties
3. Junglee Girl
Junglee’ is a term used in India to label the wild, the uncivilized, the untamed. In her collection of short stories, Ginu Kamani reclaims the phrase junglee’ girl to explore the lives of women on the edge of their own power: playing with social taboos and awakening to womanhood, sexuality, and independence.
Shadow on a Tightrope, the first anthology to come out of the fat liberation movement, is a powerful collection of articles, personal stories, and poems in which fat people reject fat-hating society, claim space, and affirm their right to exist as they are.
In Me as her again, Nancy Agabian offers an illuminating meditation on the sometimes bizarre entanglement of individual desire in the web of family life and history. The aftermath of her grandmother’s survival of the Armenian Genocide has left Agabian afloat in the sea of traumatic legacy and self-exploration.
6. Gulf Dreams
The sensual, fragmented imagery of Emma Pérez centers upon the conquest of the brown female body, reclaiming it from a history of colonialism, racism, sexism, and violence. Set in the US/Mexico borderlands, this protagonist holds on to her love for another woman as she traverses a landscape of trauma.
Feministing.com contributor Verónica Bayeti Flores says “[silva’s characters in flesh to bone] push to find themselves at home in their bodies — in sexual bodies, sick bodies, magical bodies. They struggle to find home on foreign lands, and on now colonized lands their people have lived in forever. They search for home in the body of a lover, on wet earth, in dreams, and in myths.”
“I was criminalized, that’s what it means to be arrested and interrogated and confined to barracks. I became a nonperson. And my crime was…what was my crime? Not lesbianism, obviously, though everyone was pretending that’s what it was. My crime was saying it out loud. My crime was authenticity. Honesty. Honesty, that obligation of poets and writers.”
—Judy Grahn, from A Simple Revolution
Chicana dyke-feminist, tejana, patlache: Gloria Anzaldúa carves a language of transformation and power for identities that have historically been marked deviant or shameful. The language in Borderlands/LaFrontera has become essential to future generations who seek to reshape borderlands into spaces of transformation.
“The fact that we are here and that I speak now these words is an attempt to break the silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”
—Audre Lorde, from Cancer Journals