3 Fiction Genres That Have Impacted Me as a Black Queer Woman

Sub-genres I started reading that changed my worldview

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Like a lot of people I know, I spent my formative years immersed in fictional worlds. I was a regular at the local library. I was sneakily reading trilogies under my desk when I should’ve been doing calculus. I rarely spent more than a few days per book and blew through novels like nobody’s business.

Then I became an adult.

For most of my college career the only books I carried around were typically dense, unwieldy, and astronomically expensive. Post-graduation left me feeling lost and disconnected from my prior identity as an “ avid reader.”

In 2018, determined to reclaim that identity, I challenged myself to read more books with stories familiar to me as a Black queer woman. My childhood was defined mostly by the fiction of straight white women, and my academics were defined mostly by the literature of straight white men. I wanted to spend some time examining stories by people who might better reflect some of my own experiences.

Here are a few of the genres that helped me do that:

Afrofantasy

I’ve written quite a bit on Afrofantasy before, so this probably won’t come as much of a surprise…