More sparks will be flying this Fourth of July, and not just the sparklers and fireworks variety. Since the orange-dusted despot took office for a second term, we have born witness to the dysfunction of the democracy machine in accelerated mode. Project 2025’s authoritarian agenda is the monkey wrench thrown in the works, causing said sparks. Given the circumstances and bearing in mind the US’s histories, does it make sense to give credence to the Fourth of July at all? And as we protest against the wannabe king, who and what is this holiday for? Some of our authors have a few words to say about it. Read more →

By Marcos Gonsalez | Chanting, cackling, shouting, and frolicking up Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue, flaunting our booty shorts and glittered skin, we marched. It was June 2019, and thousands of us queers were having a grand old gay time at the first Queer Liberation March. The march was held the same day as the yearly Pride parade, in protest against that corporatized, sanitized bigger event. At the Liberation March were anti-capitalists, gender deviants, anarchists, kink-positive folks, Marxists, and all other stripes of queer radicals. This was the parade for me. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Gasp! Google Calendar looks much less iridescent and fabulous this June. It’s giving a serious case of the blahs, and the face card is nothing but a 404 error. Where’s that righteous realness for human rights? Oh, that’s right. Google Calendar banished Pride Month into the cyber memory hole. Well, that’s on them. They’ll sashay away into the quicksand of queerphobia as we werk it to keep the party going nonstop. Read more →

A Q&A with Terry Galloway | I was really pissed that most of the YouTube videos featuring babies getting cochlear implants show their little faces lighting up with joy when they first hear Mama cooing their names. Hah. Don’t believe it. A lot of those babies—me and a ton of others—scream bloody murder when those things are first turned on. Your brain can be so overwhelmed that you want the bang that implant right out of your head. I want to inspire more of those videos. Read more →

A Q&A with Terry Galloway | I’m so honored that Beacon has published this anniversary edition. They love writers at Beacon, and even though I’m a one-book writer, I’m glad to be caught up in their regard. As for rereading “Mean Little deaf Queer”—oh my god! I could see every flaw, every misstep, every mouthy sentence. And not just that. I was blithely writing about things I wouldn’t have admitted to a therapist (if I had one). Read more →

A Q&A with Susan Swan | With the exception of my novel about a fraudster like Canada’s Conrad Black, you’re correct to say I’ve drawn from my life experiences for my fiction. Maybe that’s why it didn’t feel strange to write a memoir, a form that distills and dramatizes like a novel. And I had to find a trajectory through my story the way I do when I’m writing a novel. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | It wasn’t just Black History Month that Google Calendar removed from its holiday list. They did away with Women’s History Month, too. Just check your phones. In true fashion of an avowed fascist’s pick me, Big Tech was thorough with the forty-seventh administration’s anti-DEI scourge. But we said it once and we’ll say it again: We don’t need you to recognize Women’s History Month. Keep on with pandering to the patriarchy as we keep this party rolling. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Did you check your phones? Is it any shock that Google Calendar genuflected to the current scorched-earth administration’s anti-DEI tour and removed Black History Month from its holiday list during Black History Month? Is it a shock that they claimed their holiday list wasn’t “globally scalable or sustainable?” Talk about Big Tech being an avowed fascist’s pick me. Doublespeak and all. Well, guess what, Google Calendar? We don’t need you to recognize Black History Month. Read more →

A Q&A with Jeanne Theoharis and Gayatri Patnaik | When I published the original edition, I did so without being able to see a cache of Rosa Parks’s papers that had been held for years by Guernsey’s auction following a dispute over her estate. In late 2014, Howard Buffett, horrified by a news story about how Rosa Parks’s papers and effects were being held by this auction house, instructed his foundation to act, bought them and then donated the papers and photographs to the Library of Congress. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | And the New Year’s category is . . . Transformation! As the oligarchs of the free world steer us on a rocky ride toward dire changes we didn’t want, we’ll be focused on changing ourselves for the greater good. What shall we work on? Expanding our minds about what Buddhism is and what it has to offer? Ditching the me-centric trend of girlboss feminism? Renegotiating our relationship with social media? Beefing up at the gym without the macho trappings? This handful of titles from Beacon’s catalog will set us on the runway of life to get tens across the board for progress and self-reinvention! Read more →

Whew! Now that we are shutting the door on that messy guest called 2024, we are officially in our unwind and imbibe era until further notice. Join us, won’t you? Because your books should be as good as your booze. We asked our staff members which beverage, cocktail, or mocktail they would pair with their favorite Beacon book, and they did not disappoint. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | If last Christmas, you gave someone your heart, and the very next day, they gave it away, this year, to save yourself from tears, you’ll give it to your TBR list! ALL our books are 30% off through December 31 during our holiday sale! Read more →

By Atef Abu Saif | All of a sudden, with the resumption of war, Khan Younis has become the Israeli’s primary target. It’s like they have followed me here. Last night, shelling and missile strikes could be heard on all sides. I hadn’t seen a ‘ring of fire’ style attack since I left the north, but as I lay on Mamoun’s floor, trying to sleep, the orchestra of war struck up again. Likewise, the old habits kicked in: counting the attacks, speculating on the types of rockets being used, wondering where each strike landed. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | It’s going to be another four years of accelerated survival mode. The results of the election greenlit the sequel of the orange demagogue franchise we didn’t want. And now we need to brace ourselves for it. However, the frustration, the anger, and the grief from the spoils of November 5 are still raw. As such, some recuperation is in order. Facing the sequel can wait. Read more →

By Atef Abu Saif | I spent three hours this morning walking the streets, just walking and reflecting on things. Last night was another violent one. The siege is closing in on al-Shifa. Yesterday the administrators had to excavate a mass grave in front of the building to bury all the dead in, whilst trying not to be shot in the process. Closer to home, we heard renewed attacks on the nearby Indonesian Hospital in the early hours. Many civilian houses were hit. People’s access to that hospital has become impossible. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Here we are again with the nail-biting tension from four years ago. The neck-and-neck polls between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump alerted our attention to other issues at play in addition to the debate and rally talking points. Lies about voter fraud that distract us from how voter suppression at the systemic level threatens our voting rights. Read more →

By Atef Abu Saif | Last night was most violent. Some 600 people were killed in attacks on different parts of the Strip. At around 11pm I heard an explosion nearby. The usual sequence: the screech of a rocket, a flash in the darkness, then the explosion. I was lying on the mattress, in the middle of the flat (away from the windows), trying to sleep, and had almost dosed off when I noticed a dark and noxious cloud filling the street. No one seemed to be out there. Read more →

By Atef Abu Saif | I hardly slept last night. For the last two nights I’ve managed to keep a kind of routine: dinner at 8pm, smoke a narghile till 9pm, catch up with WhatsApp messages till 9.15; call Hanna and the kids and talk to them till about 10.45, after which I’m ready to sleep. For two nights it worked. Last night, though, it didn’t. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | A Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month unmarred by election-year drama would have been a miracle. No such luck in 2024. Not with anti-immigrant rhetoric regrowing its Hydra’s head when right-wing candidates take to the debate and rally stages. If that weren’t enough, Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month started off with news that Jeanine Cummins will release new novel next year about the aftermath of a hurricane in Puerto Rico. Read more →

By Remica Bingham-Risher | I met [Sonia] Sanchez at the second Furious Flower Conference in 2004, where she performed with her band Full Moon of Sonia, and interviewed her a few years later. As we had just begun to get to know each other and I was a young mostly unpublished poet, I was surprised to be invited to a gathering at her house that first evening we sat together. At Sanchez’s party, there was food spread from end to end on a large wooden table; people filled the house and were almost as interesting and varied as the art stationed in every room. Read more →