Every June, we celebrate Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Asexual, and Intersex (LGBTQAI+) Pride Month, remembering and honoring the 1969 Stonewall riots. Today, as the fight for LGBTQAI+ rights continues in the U.S., our schools, universities, and corporations are committed to fostering a culture of meaningful diversity and inclusion. The Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau represents many speakers who facilitate these important discussions.
Memoir
Jacob Tobia
Author of the bestselling memoir Sissy, Jacob Tobia shares comical but deeply personal, unapologetic, and candid stories from their own coming-to-gender journey while showing the playful nature of non-binary genders and how gender is limitless.
Will Schwalbe and Chris Maxey
Will Schwalbe’s memoir, We Should Not Be Friends, is a warm, funny, irresistible memoir that follows an improbable and life-changing forty-year friendship between Schwalbe and Maxey, who met in college in the 1980s when Maxey was a popular, straight, athlete and Schwalbe was a gay theater kid who volunteered with Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of the critically acclaimed She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, one of the first works to present trans experience from the perspective of a literary novelist, and co-author of NYT Bestseller Mad Honey.
Sarah McBride
Delaware State Senate Sarah McBride’s Tomorrow Will Be Different chronicles her journey as a transgender woman, from coming out to her family and school community, to fighting for equality in her home state and nationally, to her heartbreaking romance with her late husband.
Literature
K-Ming Chang
A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, K-Ming Chang’s Gods of Want is a surrealist collection that mixes myth and migration, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian.
Leila Mottley
A 2023 Lammy Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and selected by Oprah Winfrey for her 2022 Book Club, Leila Mottley’s blazing debut novel Nightcrawling, inspired by a true police scandal, explores Black girlhood and what it means to attempt to find joy, family, and community.
Bryan Washington
A rising star in the literary world, Bryan Washington’s Memorial, which was longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and was Good Morning America November 2021 book club pick, follows a young biracial couple, Benson and Mike, as they navigate love, both romantic and familial.
Robert Jones, Jr.
A finalist for the National Book Award, Robert Jones, Jr.’s entry into literary fiction The Prophet delivers a powerful historical love story that explores Black homosexuality and gender fluidity, centering around the forbidden relationship between two enslaved Black young men on a cotton plantation in antebellum Mississippi.