RAM Blog

By Terje Snow, Marketing Officer, and Julia Petrov, Curator Daily Life and Leisure, with contributions from the Pride Centre of Edmonton and Calgary Outlink 

Happy Pride Month! With COVID making Pride celebrations happen at home again this year, we reached out to The Pride Centre of Edmonton, and Calgary Outlink for their favourite book recommendations.

Did you know: The Pride Centre of Edmonton's library is the largest LGBTQ2S+ collection in Western Canada? Here are Executive Director Dawn Carter's recommended books by local authors, and/or about the Canadian queer experience:

• The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor
• Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown
• This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt
• I'm Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya
• Horn by Shima Robinson

And here are a few suggestions from Jamelie Bachallani, The Pride Centre of Edmonton's Social Media Manager:

• Coconut by Nisha Patel
• High School by Tegan and Sara
• Out North: An Archive of Queer Activism and Kinship in Canada by Craig Jennex and Nisha Eswaran

Calgary Outlink's library has long been a source of great pride! Here are a few recommendations from their team:

• Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging edited by Suzanne Lenon and OmiSoore H. Dryden
• The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell
• Our Past Matters: Stories of Gay Calgary by Kevin Allen
• The Boy and the Bindi by Vivek Shraya
• Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

One book we treasure here at the museum is The Edmonton Queen by Darrin Hagen, which was donated to us by Murray Billett, an Edmonton human rights activist and a former member of the police commission; he was an advisor and media contact for Delwin Vriend during his landmark Supreme Court case.

Looking for more? 

The Edmonton Public Library has a list of 7 LGBTQ+ Alberta Writers You Need to Check Out



Calgary Queer Arts Society also has a great list of books.