Collage by Beth Hoeckel.
Shade Magazine
Shade Magazine is a ongoing collaborative project featuring emerging artists of color from all mediums, most notably photography, music, and film. Artists of color are usually silenced, ignored, or misrepresented in the art world. Shade provides a platform where our ideas can be seen and shared within a community that pushes for change. This zine uses creativity as a means to start dialogue—dialogue that can be easier to engage in with art by its side. Founded by Azha and Apryl in the Bay Area, Shade has been putting unrepresented artists of color on the map for almost three years now. Shade isn’t just a zine. It’s a manifestation of all the activism we’ve been seeing these past few years. Now that Trump is our president-elect, publications like Shade need to exist now more than ever. —Zoé Lawrence
The Girl Who Slept With God
Val Brelinski
2015, Viking
Set in Arco, Idaho, in 1970, The Girl Who Slept With God is an honest telling of fundamental Christianity, family, and what it means to come-of-age in a conservative small town. Thirteen-year-old Jory is coming to terms with her own religious identity when her older sister comes back pregnant from a mission trip. Grace, the older sister, believes she is pregnant with the child of God. Their father sends both of them to live on their own on the edge of town. As Jory navigates her first year of high school, she also must realize her family’s desperate need for redemption and purity. I bought this book in Maine, thinking it would be a “beach read” that I could take on long car rides. Oh boy, I was wrong. Sometimes, a book just falls in your lap, ready to change your life. So you devour it, page by page until there are only a few chapters left and you have to save it for the next day because you don’t want it to ever end. —Lennon Walter
milk and honey
Rupi Kaur
2014, Createspace
Canadian poet Rupi Kaur is 24, but her words bear such wisdom and experience. Between the pages of her first collection of poems, milk and honey, are rich lives wrapped in love and loss, abuse and recovery, grief and hope. Further explored are the ways that feminism, and femininity itself, are intwined with these phenomena. Every poem says just enough to evoke an assortment of emotions, but is so short that it leaves you with an equal number of questions. For women, particularly women of color, each story feels somewhat relatable—as she unravels the societal pressures that affect us and the way they invade intimate relationships. This collection of poems is special to me as it has always provided me with real serenity whenever things have felt chaotic. If you’re similarly seeking some stress-free poetic refuge, this might be for you. —Micha Frazer-Carroll ♦