Rarely do we know what life will hold. When starting the adoption process, Jane Byers and her wife could not have predicted the illuminating and challenging experience of living for two weeks with the Evangelical Christian foster parents of their soon-to-be adopted twins. Parenthood becomes even more daunting when homophobia threatens their beginni …

The German word zugunruhe translates as the “stirring before moving.” It’s used to describe birds and herds of animals, like wildebeests, before the great migration. Though Jules Torti is neither German nor a wildebeest, she understands this marrow-deep anxiousness all too well; she is just someone looking for a home.

Free to a Good Home is ev …

This mouthwatering, intimate, and sensual memoir traces Monica Meneghetti’s unique life journey through her relationship with food, family and love. As the youngest child of a traditional Italian-Catholic immigrant family, Monica learns the intimacy of the dinner table and the ritual of meals, along with the requirements of conformity both at the …

In her debut collection of poetry, Lisa Baird explores themes of trauma and recovery, everyday violence and queerness from a personal point of view as well as a wider political scope. These poems bear witness to the resilience of bodies and sexualities and are grounded in an earthy humour. Baird's poetic style shifts from lyric to deeply personal t …

Chenille or Silk is a startling first collection of confessional poetry examining the slippery relations of desire, class, embodiment and trauma. Emma McKenna's writing traverses the bounds and the wounds of a family marked by poverty and intergenerational trauma. The collection asserts the primacy of intimacy and sexuality to subjectivity, as the …

There's no straightforward path to LGBTQ2 parenthood and just as every queer person has their own coming out story, every LGBTQ2 family has a unique conception or adoption story.

In SWELLING WITH PRIDE: QUEER CONCEPTION AND ADOPTION STORIES, creative non-fiction writers celebrate LGBTQ2 families and the myriad of ways we embark upon our parenting j …

The follow-up to Independent Publisher Award winner, Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl, reflects on the tenious relationship between a queer daughter and her terminal mother. At turns tender, dark and funny, FOOD WAS HER COUNTRY tracks a tempestuous mother-daughter relationship and the life-long culinary journey that leads them …

What strange gravity draws two people together? What pulls them apart?

In THE SMALL WAY, a woman re-evaluates herself and her marriage as she comes to terms with a spouse's transition. Intimate and powerful, the poems celebrate the courage of a partner coming out as a trans woman and records the confusion in facing a partner's changing gender ident …

Growing up during the 50s and 60s in small town Alberta, Pam was keenly aware, by the age of nine, that she was a lesbian. And she also knew well to hide this about herself. Pam would search for books on the "The Island of Lesbos", only to return from the library with a copy of Little Women. In between the vast spaces of dust and dugouts, she grows …

Butch: Not Like the Other Girls is a photographic exploration of the liminal spaces occupied by female masculinity in contemporary communities. Its first incarnation exhibited as a public art project in transit shelters around Vancouver in March-April 2013, with a simultaneous gallery show at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre (the Cultch). Accordi …

Jane Byers' Acquired Community is both a collection of narrative poems about seminal moments in North American lesbian and gay history, mostly post-World War II, and a series of first person poems that act as a touchstone to compare the narrator's coming out experience within the larger context of the gay liberation movement.

The "parade" poems such …

“Wanted: lesbian couple to foster wonderful eleven-year-old African American boy with gender identity issues.” Meet Antwan. Not only has he got gender issues, he’s severely emotionally disturbed, severely demanding and, as he puts it, “born to argue.” In the late nineties, Nicola Harwood and her girlfriend moved to San Francisco in order …

In the canon of contemporary feminist and lesbian poetry, For Your Own Good breaks silence. A fictionalized autobiography, the poems in this collection illustrate the narrator's survival of a domestic and sexual violence in a lesbian relationship. There is magic in this work: the symbolism of the Tarot and the roots of Jewish heritage, but also the …