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.
Biography & 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.
Tourmaline
An award-winning artist, filmmaker, Tourmaline is a cultural force whose visionary work illuminates Black, queer, and trans histories. Her forthcoming book, Marsha, is a deeply personal and poetic tribute to legendary LGBTQAI+ activist Marsha P. Johnson. With global audiences, Tourmaline shares her bold voice rooted in joy, resistance, and truth-telling.
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.
Prentis Hemphill
Prentis Hemphill (they/them) is a political organizer and bestselling author of What It Takes To Heal. With a deep understanding of intersectionality, Hemphill connects with diverse audiences to navigate leadership transitions, support community accountability, and inspire transformation, while also sharing their work which focuses on dismantling systems of oppression and fostering inclusive communities.
Garrard Conley
Garrard Conley is author of the acclaimed memoir Boy Erased, which has been translated into over a dozen languages and is now a major motion picture. His newest book, All the World Beside, is an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the love story between two men in Puritan New England.
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.
Literature & Poetry
Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong’s critically acclaimed works, like New York Times-bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, contain timeless themes of class, queerness, and identity. Vuong engages audiences in thoughtful discussions on his writing process and the themes behind his groundbreaking poetry and prose. His highly-anticipated new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, publishes in May 2025.
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. Her first poetry collection, woke up no light, published in April 2024.
Jedidiah Jenkins
Jedidiah Jenkins is a professional adventurer who has bicycled from Oregon to Patagonia and (alongside his mother) walked from New Orleans back to the Pacific Northwest. With his journal in hand, he wrote about his experiences on the road, studied human purpose, and found fulfillment. An inspiring speaker, Jenkins encourages audiences to turn their dreams into reality and pursue a life fueled by wonder and adventure.
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.
Olivia Gatwood
Olivia Gatwood is a poet, educator, and author of Whoever You Are, Honey. On tours across the country, she talks about her craft, gender politics, and women’s empowerment, also dissecting topics of girlhood, queerness, and the intersection of humanity and technology.
Andrea Bartz
Andrea Bartz is a journalist, editor, and the bestselling author of The Lost Night, The Herd, We Were Never Here, The Spare Room and The Last Ferry Out (May 2025). Called the “master of the feminist thriller” (LA Times), Bartz challenges thriller genre tropes by creating fictional settings where women wield the power and shares her techniques for turning ideas on a napkin into 400-page novels in entertaining and lively talks with audiences.