A Wildflower Returns...

The paperback edition of The Risk It Takes to Bloom is here and tomorrow is a big day for Black trans publishing.

Dear Wildflowers,

Tomorrow will be a major day in Black trans publishing.

The ever-iconic Laverne Cox, will release her memoir, Transcendent, in hardcover. And I will release the paperback edition of The Risk It Takes to Bloom. I have to give Laverne all the love for being my first conversation partner on Bloom’s hardcover launch day back in November 2023. And I’m so thrilled for how her book will inevitably shift our community’s trajectory.

But back to tomorrow. We will drop new tomes nearly 60 years after the Stonewall riots, where Black trans women like Marsha P. Johnson and Zaza Nova helped usher in a new world where queer and trans voices were more undeniable than ever.

I’m often thinking about the lineage. Sometimes it gives obsession, but we’ll move along. I’m thinking about Janet Mock, a dear friend and award-winning author, someone I saw so much of my own story in, navigating journalism and media as a Black trans woman long before this era of influencers and visibility made it look effortless. I’m thinking about The Lady Chablis, and an audio recording I found of her reading her iconic Black Southern autobiography, Hiding My Candy: The Autobiography of the Grand Empress of Savannah, released in 1996. My book came out about 30 years after hers and in between, there had not been another major Black trans Southern memoir. In that gap is where I fought for every ounce of authenticity and power on the page.

This version of Bloom—truer, more weathered, more mine—includes a new foreword where I get candid about what it meant to release this memoir at the end of 2023, a month after October 7th. It was dizzying. There was so much grief among the liberation-minded folks I call my family and so much spin happening from government officials and mainstream media. I also write about what it cost to publish this book in an industry that, in many ways, did not see my power. I look back on it as both a privilege and tussle.

This version also includes a poem from Mosab Abu Toha, whose words found me on the very social media platforms that continuously silence Palestinian voices. I couldn’t ignore the overlap of what he and many other comrades have documented, the ways protesters on college campuses and in the streets were painted as threats mirror exactly how trans people and our accomplices are being painted now. And now, whenever I return to Bloom’s epilogue, “Welcome to the Garden,” I feel how much farther we have to go.

I feel blessed that Bloom is still transforming my life. And I want to share more about where I am with you. Join me on a mini-tour to celebrate the paperback launch.

Tomorrow, June 9th, I’ll be in Atlanta at the Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs, in conversation with Alicia Garza. A meeting of movement minds. So much of my work stands on the foundation she and others laid and I chronicle my first steps into that world in this book.

On Saturday, June 13th, I’ll be at the Schomburg Center in New York. It’ll be my second time there and it’s always an honor to be held in that lineage of Black radical tradition and thought.

I want to thank everyone who has been part of Bloom‘s journey as we enter this new chapter. I’m thinking about the work ahead, about who I want to be, what kind of woman, what kind of steward of liberation, what infrastructure I deserve to sustain this work for the long haul.

This is just my first book and it certainly won’t be my last.

With love,
Raquel