📚 Literary Liberation: Black LGBTQIA+ Authors Rewriting the Canon

Across the diaspora, a renaissance is unfolding on the page. Black LGBTQIA+ authors are reshaping modern literature—telling stories where identity is celebrated, not silenced.

In Trinidad, queer femme author Kamryn Kingsberry released her debut novel Star Fruit, a luminous tale where ancestral magic meets teenage love. Her heroine, a queer girl named Nia, discovers both her lineage and her power through stories passed down by her grandmother.

Kingsberry says her own upbringing inspired the book:

“My grandmother’s stories taught me magic.
My queerness taught me truth.
This book is both.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Dr. Asha Monroe—a Black trans scholar from Atlanta—has set academia ablaze with Vengeance Feminism. The book, now a 2025 ASALH Book Prize winner, argues that feminism cannot be whole without Black trans women at its core. During a keynote at Howard University, Monroe declared:

“Feminism must be fierce.
And it must be ours.”

Book clubs from Lagos to London have embraced both titles, while TikTok reviewers tag them #BlackQueerReads. In classrooms, teachers are pairing Star Fruit with Audre Lorde’s essays, sparking conversations about love, lineage, and liberation.