It’s time for the second annual Willy Literary Awards. I read 52 books this year, listed below.
About the winner: Manhunt is a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel about a zombie virus that infects people with enough testosterone, turning virtually all cis men, a solid chunk of trans men, some trans women, women with PCOS, and others into raping, murderous zombies. There is a fascist TERF governmental force annihilating trans women and the story follows a group of trans women as they harvest testicles from the zombies to make estrogen and otherwise struggle and fight to survive in a hateful world. From this difficult premise, Gretchen Felker-Martin weaves magic with a sickeningly relentless action-packed narration that manages to shed light on the complexities of womenhood, trans sexuality, gendered violence, and the politics of survival. Liberal tenderqueers stay away. If you are faint of heart, stay away. This book is brutal without being gratuitous with its violence. Even its most earth-shatteringly fucked up rape scenes propel the narrative forward, facing a terrible world unblinkingly. This book has received much undeserved criticism from readers whose traumatophobia prevents them from sitting with the discomfort and pain Felker-Martin offers. Through her extreme premise, Felker-Martin breaks a visceral path into a felt understanding of gendered violence. This viscerality in her approach breaks through cliched, sentimental equally traumatophobic master narratives of what gendered violence is and who we are after experiencing it. Felker-Martin’s victims are broken but undefeatable. They will never heal but they will always survive and grow. A friend and I used to joke about being so excited to take down the patriarchy and learning all the ways women would oppress people. What’s funny is that Manhunt isn’t a book that reduces men to monsters, even though that’s literally the premise. Rather, through cuttingly honest and heartbreaking scenes, Felker-Martin shows how queer folx and women sometimes replicate violent schemata in their communities. Its honest conversations about the ways queer and feminist communities sometimes fails us made me feel seenin a way all the books worried about having the correct politics never do. With acerbic wit and down-to-earth moments, Felker-Martin’s characters felt like real people I have met and known.
Other fiction reads this year:
1. The Inhabited Woman / Gioconda Belli / 1988
2. Once We Were Warriors / Alan Duff / 1990
3. Carmilla / Sheridan Le Fanu / 1872
4. Never Whistle in The Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology / edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. / 2023
5. Autoboygraphy / Christina Lauren / 2017
6. 100 Years of Solitude / Gabriel Garcia Marquez / 1967
7. Temporada de huracanes / Fernanda Melchor / 2017
8. Out There Screaming: Am Anthology of New Black Horror / Edited by Jordan Peele / 2023
9. Red Ants / Jose Pergentino / 2012
10. The Runaway Restaurant / Tessa Yang / 2022
About the winners: Franz Fanon has taken one of my most burnt out periods of my life and made it one where I have dived into books with a renewed passion. I’m devouring academic books now for the first time after years outside of graduate school. I’m voracious, I’m angry, and I’m ready now thanks to Fanon. Fern Brady, on the other hand, represents an exceptional disabled memoir. Disability politics is key to our survival as a planet. Until we center disability, we won’t win. I’m taking all recs here. I have a lot of reading to catch up on.
Other non-fiction reads this year:
1. M to (WT)F / Samantha Allen / 2020
2. Real Queer America / Samantha Allen / 2019
3. Pleasure Activism / Edited by adrienne marie brown / 2019
4. Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex / Angela Chen / 2020
5. Somewhere We Are Human / edited by Reyna Grande / 2022
6. Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp / Lily Havey / 2014
7. The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai / Ha Jin / 2019
8. Hood Feminism / Mikki Kendall / 2020
9. When The Chickenheads Come to Roost / Joan Morgan / 1999
10. My Kitchen Table / Pilar Pobil / 2007
11. The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latino/a Social Justice, Theology, and Identity / Robert Chao Romero / 2020
12. Sexuality Beyond Consent / Avgi Saketepoulou / 2023
13. Being Seen: A Deaf Blind Women's Fight to End Ableism / Elsa Sjunneson / 2021
14. Solito / Javier Zamora / 2022
About the WInner: Carlos Cortez feels like my most true literary ancestor. He woulda thrived in slam, but his work is so much bigger than it. Environmental, Race Conscious, and with an eye on anarchism, he wrote like he was trying to build a new world with his pen.
Other poetry and theatre reads:
1. When She Woke, She Was An Open Field / Hilary Brown / 2017
2. Brown Girl Chromatography / Anuradha Bhowmik / 2022
3. Early Uncollected Poems / Lucille Clifton / 1965-1969
4. Coyote Song: Collected Poems and Selected Art of Carlos Cortez / Carlos Cortez / 2023
5. Drift migration / Danielle Dubrasky / 2022
6. Dear Lin / Lin Flores / 2023
7. Who Look At Me / June Jordan / 1969
8. Some Changes / June Jordan / 1971
9. The Hurting Kind / Ada Limón / 2022
10. Tres Tercas Trincheras / Marielos Olivo / 2023
11. Ocean Filibuster / Pearldamour / 2016 (Theatre)
12. El Rey of Gold Teeth / Reyes Ramirez / 2023
13. The Best Barbarian / Roger Reeves / 2023
14. Relinqueda / Alexandra Regalado / 2022
15. Knees in the Garden / Christina Rodriguez / 2023
16. Chicana Falsa / Michele Serros / 1998
17. Gaze Back / Marylyn Tan / 2018
Children’s Books
1. Mis Zapatos y Yo / Rene Colato Laínez / 2019
2. A Dinosaur Named Ruth / Julia Lyons / 2021
STATS
5% of authors were disabled - I’m gonna work on getting this number up for next year.
28.8% of authors were LGBTQ+ - Healthy :)
13.4% of authors were outside the US - Not bad, but I want to be reading more international lit. Ideally, I’m closer to 30% here I think.
This makes me happy.
I want to be reading more Native/Islander Lit, but feeling good otherwise.
I need to read more old stuff.
Theatre is my biggest weakness. Need to work on that.