Here are 7 Author Shoutouts for this week, authors we love to recommend. Find your favorite author or discover an author whose work you’ve not yet read.
~Rebecca Yarros
~ Cicero
~ Mary Schmich
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This Week’s Author Shoutouts
Torrey Peters
An Author Shoutout to Torrey Peters, an American author who has emerged as a defining voice in contemporary literature, celebrated for her acid wit and nuanced exploration of trans identity. She is best known for her breakout debut novel, Detransition, Baby (2021), which follows the complicated lives of a trans woman, her detransitioned ex-partner, and his pregnant boss as they navigate an unconventional co-parenting arrangement. The novel earned Peters the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and made her the first openly trans woman longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Her follow-up, the 2025 collection Stag Dance, further showcases her stylistic range. The titular novella—a mythic “Americana tall tale” set in a 19th-century logging camp—has been praised for its Cormac McCarthy-esque prose and unique lumberjack lingo. Before her mainstream success, Peters was a pioneer of the trans literary scene, self-publishing novellas online to bypass traditional industry gatekeeping.
Peters’ global perspective is informed by a young adulthood spent in Cameroon, Uganda, and the Dominican Republic. Academically, she holds a Master’s in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Outside of writing, she is an avid motorcyclist and an amateur sauna builder who splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont. By refusing to sanitize her narratives for a cisgender audience, Peters has created a body of work that is as intellectually rigorous as it is emotionally raw.
Imogen Binnie
An Author Shoutout to Imogen Binnie, an American novelist and screenwriter widely credited with catalyzing the modern wave of transgender literature. Her work is celebrated for its punk rock sensibility, sharp humor, and refusal to simplify the trans experience for a cisgender audience.
Binnie’s 2013 debut, Nevada, is hailed as a cult classic and a foundational text of the Transgender Vanguard. The novel follows Maria Griffiths, a trans woman on a cross-country road trip, and was written specifically for a trans audience rather than as a didactic memoir. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, it was reissued in 2022 to critical acclaim and named one of The Atlantic’s* Great American Novels in 2024. Binnie also contributed to the Stonewall Award-winning sci-fi anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere.
Her career is rooted in indie punk and zine culture; she was a longtime columnist for Maximum Rocknroll and self-published influential zines like Stereotype Threat. Beyond her novels, she has written for television series such as Cruel Summer and Doubt. Professionally, Binnie also works as a mental health therapist in Vermont, a role that mirrors the grounded, psychological depth found in her fiction. By centering trans protagonists in messy, authentic narratives, Binnie shifted the literary landscape, inspiring a new generation of writers to tell stories that are unapologetically dark, funny, and real.
Kate Bornstein
An Author Shoutout to Kate Bornstein, an iconic American author, playwright, and performance artist who has served as a trailblazing voice in gender theory since the 1980s. Identifying as non-binary, Bornstein is celebrated for her auntie-like warmth, sharp wit, and revolutionary approach to dismantling the gender binary.
Her foundational 1994 text, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, remains a staple of queer studies, arguing that gender is a performative cultural construct rather than a biological mandate. Bornstein’s 2012 memoir, A Queer and Pleasant Danger, provides a gripping account of her twelve years in the Church of Scientology—where she served as a high-ranking lieutenant commander—before her subsequent transition and emergence as a queer icon. Additionally, her compassionate guide for marginalized youth, Hello, Cruel World, was recently updated for its 20th anniversary in 2025, continuing her mission to provide creative alternatives to self-harm.
An academic and theatrical pioneer, Bornstein was the first person to graduate from Brown University with a degree in Theatre Arts. She famously translated these skills to the stage, making her Broadway debut at age 70 in Straight White Men. Despite facing significant health challenges, including lung cancer and PTSD, she remains a resilient advocate for at-risk youth. Awarded the Lambda Literary Pioneer Award, Bornstein continues to influence the literary world with her inclusive philosophy: “Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living. Just don’t be mean.”
Akwaeke Emezi
An Author Shoutout to Akwaeke Emezi, an acclaimed Nigerian author and visual artist celebrated for their prolific output across multiple genres and their radical centering of Igbo metaphysics and Black queer identities. Emezi, who identifies as non-binary and as an ogbanje—an Igbo spirit born into a human body—often uses their work to explore the intersections of spirituality, gender, and the fractured self.
Their 2018 debut, Freshwater, was a New York Times Notable Book that introduced readers to this spiritual lens, followed by the bestseller The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), which won the Nommo Award. Emezi’s versatility is a hallmark of their career; they have moved seamlessly from National Book Award-nominated young adult fiction (Pet) to the steamy romance You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, currently being developed into a film by Amazon Studios. In 2025 alone, they expanded their bibliography with the YA fantasy Sọmadịna and the paranormal romance Son of the Morning.
Born in Nigeria to an Igbo father and a Tamil mother, Emezi’s background is as diverse as their bibliography. After moving to the U.S. at sixteen, they initially studied veterinary science before pivoting to an MFA at Syracuse University. Now based in New Orleans, Emezi continues to integrate ritual and visual art into their creative practice. By viewing their own transition as a bridge to their spiritual nature, Emezi has become a singular voice in contemporary literature, challenging Western binaries and redefining the boundaries of the memoir and the novel.
Kayleb Rae Candrilli
An Author Shoutout to Kayleb Rae Candrilli, a celebrated American poet and a vital voice in contemporary transgender and queer literature. Their work is widely praised for its formal innovation, its deep connection to the rural American landscape, and its tender, resilient exploration of trans-masculinity, sobriety, and healing.
Candrilli first gained significant acclaim with their debut collection, What My Body Knows That I Don’t (2017), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. This was followed by the James Laughlin Award-winning All the Gay Saints (2020), which introduced many readers to their unique double-exposure poem—a form inspired by photography where two poems can be read separately or together as a third, merged piece. Their 2021 collection, Water I Won’t Touch, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and they continued their exploration of faith and the body with the 2025 release of Winter of Worship.
A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowship, Candrilli holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. Their poetry often draws from their upbringing in rural Pennsylvania, using the woods and rivers of the Northeast as a backdrop for navigating recovery and domestic life. By insisting on a poetics of joy, Candrilli’s writing serves as a field guide for survival, envisioning a future where trans people can grow old and flourish. Their work remains a master class in trans-poetics, offering a profound meditation on how we inhabit both our bodies and the world.
Jordy Rosenberg
An Author Shoutout to Jordy Rosenberg, an American author, scholar, and Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is celebrated for his metafictional panache and his ability to weave complex queer theory and Marxist analysis into gripping, often irreverent narratives.
Rosenberg’s highly acclaimed debut novel, Confessions of the Fox (2018), is a trans-male reimagining of the 18th-century thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard. Presented as a lost manuscript discovered by a contemporary academic, the book was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. More recently, he released Night Night Fawn (March 2026), a ferociously funny unauthorized memoir of a terminally ill, opioid-high Jewish yenta in Manhattan. The novel, praised by Torrey Peters as having an “unhinged, urgent id,” explores intergenerational conflict, Zionism, and the protagonist’s estrangement from her trans son.
Beyond fiction, Rosenberg is a significant theorist in the field of Transgender Marxism. He contributed the influential afterword, One Utopia, One Dystopia, to the 2021 volume Transgender Marxism, where he argues for a path into Marx that proceeds through transness. His work, supported by fellowships from MacDowell and the Lannan Foundation, frequently interrogates how history, settler colonialism, and gendered violence reproduce within the domestic sphere. By repurposing 18th-century vernacular and traditional tropes for queer purposes, Rosenberg has established himself as a fearless voice in contemporary letters, blending scholarly rigor with gutter schtick and high satire.
Isaac Fellman
An Author Shoutout to Isaac Fellman, an American author and professional archivist celebrated for his intellectual and eerie speculative fiction. His work is defined by its atmospheric, psychologically complex narratives that frequently blend Gothic tropes with contemporary transgender experiences.
Fellman’s professional background as an archivist at the California Historical Society profoundly influences his literary structure. His 2022 urban fantasy, Dead Collections, serves as a high-concept love letter to archives, featuring a trans man and vampire navigating fandom culture and queer intimacy. This archival focus reaches a peak in his latest novel, Notes from a Regicide (2026), a formally ambitious archival fantasy framed entirely through primary documents like letters and reports to detail the magical collapse of a kingdom.
The author’s acclaim includes a Lambda Literary Award for his debut, The Breath of the Sun (2018), and the 2023 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for his novella The Two Doctors Gorski. Set in a magical university, the latter explores the toxic mentorship between a telepathic student and his unstable professor. Fellman is noted for using supernatural metaphors—such as vampirism or telepathy—not to other his characters, but to explore the visceral realities of transition and medical gatekeeping.
Living in San Francisco, Fellman infuses his prose with the city’s fog-heavy, historically layered atmosphere. Occupying a liminal space between genre fiction and literary experimentalism, his work is often compared to the gothic sensibilities of Shirley Jackson, making him a singular voice in modern speculative letters.
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