LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books
Edited by Steven G. Fullwood and Lisa C. Moore
Redbone Press/Vintage Entity Press, $16.95
This compilation of almost 700 black queer titles - fiction and poetry, essays and anthologies, gay studies texts and lesbian biographies - has value enough as a useful library resource. The entries aren’t annotated, though each comes with complete bibliographic information, so tracking down titles is easy enough. And there’s a value-added component: more than two dozen interviews (and a few reviews) that add personality to the book’s bare-bones booklist. SF author and gay novelist Samuel Delany, Audre Lorde biographer Alexis de Veaux, and poets Marvin K. White, Cheryl Boyce Taylor, and Reginald Harris are among the better-known writers profiled; Delany tells what it’s like to be a black, gay, genre writer - and how those three elements don’t overlap much in his life, and de Veaux tells about the 10 years it took her to write about Lorde’s life. But the richest interviews come from lesser-known authors, among them Rashid Darden, R. Erica Doyle, and Travis Montez, who, like their peers, are passionate about the power of black words to chronicle black lives. Background here.