Miami Book Fair - Volunteer Social

On Saturday, November 18th and Sunday, November 19th, the Miami Book Fair takes to the streets with its annual Street Fair at the Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus. Both days will have festivities from 10:00AM to 7:00PM. The days are filled with excitement - meeting authors, musical performances, food and drink! 

To express our gratitude to the dedicated folxs volunteering with PRISM, we invite you to join us at the Street Fair. Those joining will receive complimentary tickets (while supplies last) to the Saturday or Sunday festivities. 

PRISM is proud to highlight some amazingly QUEER/LGBTQIA+ authors:

• Alice Winn, In Memoriam: A Novel A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during World War I • “Dazzling and wrenching, witty and wildly romantic, with echoes of Brideshead Revisited and Atonement.” —Lev Grossman, best-selling author of The Magicians.
• Amelia Possanza, Lesbian Love Story an intimate journey into the archives—uncovering the romances and role models written out of history and what their stories can teach us all about how to love. This is the story of Possanza’s journey into the archives to recover the stories of lesbians in the 20th Century: who they were, how they loved, why their stories were destroyed, and where their memories echo and live on. Centered around seven love stories for the ages, Possanza’s hunt takes readers from a Drag King show in Bushwick to the home of activists in Harlem and then across the ocean to Hadrian’s Library, where she searches for traces of Sappho in the ruins. Along the way, she discovers her own love—for swimming, for community, for New York City—and adds her own record to the archive.
• Andrew Holleran The Kingdom of Sand: A Novel A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE PICK, ONE OF THE LONDON TIMES' TOP TWENTY-SIX FICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR, LONGLIST FOR THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD First new book in sixteen years. The nameless narrator is a gay man who moved to Florida to look after his aging parents―during the height of the AIDS epidemic―and has found himself unable to leave after their deaths. With gallows humor, he chronicles the indignities of growing old in a small town.
• Bushra Rehman, Roses, In the Mouth of a Lion: A Novel A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice * An NPR Best Book of the Year * A Padma Lakshmi Book Club Pick. Razia Mirza grows up amid the wild grape vines and backyard sunflowers of Corona, Queens, with her best friend, Saima, by her side. When a family rift drives the girls apart, Razia’s heart is broken. She finds solace in Taslima, a new girl in her close-knit Pakistani-American community. They embark on a series of small rebellions: listening to scandalous music, wearing miniskirts, and cutting school to explore the city.  When Razia is accepted to Stuyvesant, a prestigious high school in Manhattan, the gulf between the person she is and the daughter her parents want her to be, widens. At Stuyvesant, Razia meets Angela and is attracted to her in a way that blossoms into a new understanding. When their relationship is discovered by an Aunty in the community, Razia must choose between her family and her own future.
• Chen Chen, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Curtis Chin, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant Nineteen eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone—from the city’s first Black mayor to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to elderly Jewish couples—could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, or American-born Chinese; where he navigated the divided city’s spiraling misfortunes; and where —between helpings of almond boneless chicken, sweet-and-sour pork, and some of his own, less-savory culinary concoctions—he realized just how much he had to offer to the world, to his beloved family, and to himself.
• Elyssa Goodman, Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City An intimate, evocative history of drag in New York City exploring its dynamic role, from the Jazz Age to Drag Race,in queer liberation and urban life.
• James Frankie Thomas, Idlewild a darkly funny story of two adults looking back on their intense teenage friendship, in a queer, trans, and early-Internet twist on the Manhattan prep school novel.From the bestselling author of We the Animals 
• Justin Torres, Blackouts: A Novel mines lost histories—personal and collective. Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life.
• Kyle Dillon Hertz,  The Lookback Window: A Novel An Electric Literature, Debutiful, and LGBTQ Reads Most Anticipated Book “Hertz has managed to tell a story of queer healing with all the narrative force of a thriller and the searing fury of an indictment.” —The New York Times Book Review Review Growing up in suburban New York, Dylan lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a troubled young man who promised to marry Dylan when he turned eighteen.
• Rajiv Mohabir, Whale Aria “For seasons I was faceless // trying to swallow constellations, / to roll a star-map on my tongue,” recounts Rajiv Mohabir’s speaker in “Boy with Baleen for Teeth.” As formally visionary and acoustically attuned as ever, Mohabir has composed an interspecies opera in Whale Aria. This collection examines the humpback whale as a zoomorphic analog of the queer, brown, migratory speaker breaching these pages; just as a person navigates postcolonial queerness across geopolitical boundaries, traveling from India to Guyana to London to New York to Honolulu, these singular cetaceans wander through disparate waters.
• Salar Abdoh, A Nearby Country Called Love is both a captivating window into contemporary Iran and a portrait of the parallel fates of a man and his country—a man who acknowledges the sullen and rumbling baggage of history but then chooses to step past its violent inheritance.
• Shastri Akella, The Sea Elephants: A Novel For fans of Shuggie Bain and A Burning, a queer coming-of-age novel set in 1990s India, about a young man who joins a traveling street theater troupe, seeking to outrun the dark secrets of his past.

For more information on the Miami Book Fair, check out: https://www.miamibookfair.com/