June 03, 2020
By Madeline Halpern, Programs Analyst at Mental Health America
Mental health and its struggles are deeply rooted in your personal experiences. Seeing someone go through something like your own experiences is validating and can empower you. Many people on the LGBTQ+ spectrum struggle to find themselves in both fiction and non-fiction books. One of the best ways to find this type of representation is by reading authors with a similar background to your own.
To help jumpstart your summer reading list, here’s a list of books by authors who identify as LGBTQ+ and are primarily people of color, authors writing about mental health and substances misuse.
- A House Among the Trees by Julia Glass
- Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria E. Anzaldúa
- Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
- Consensual Genocide by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- (Don’t) Call me Crazy by Kelly Jensen
- Everything Here is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee
- Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai
- Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
- Happiness, Like Water by Chinelo Okparanta
- Headcases: LGBTQ Writers & Artists on Mental Health and Wellness by Stephanie Schroeder
- History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera
- How to Survive a Summer by Nick White
- Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
- If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan
- Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler
- Not Vanishing by Chrystos
- On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
- Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives by Nia King
- Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love So Much More by Janet Mock
- Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison
- The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima
- Untamed by Glennon Doyle
- When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore
