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Recommended reading and podcast list for Pride Month and Immigrant Heritage Month

Learning and Evaluation

Anna Cruz

In honor of Pride Month and Immigrant Heritage Month, Kresge’s Anna Cruz, managing director of Strategic Learning, Research & Evaluation, has curated a reading and podcast list that highlights queer musicians and artists and explores gender identity, immigrant experiences and self-discovery. Here are her recommendations:

1. One of my go-to podcasts is Radio Menea, a music podcast hosted by Verónica Bayetti Flores and Miriam Zoila Pérez – two queer Latinx friends with wildly different music tastes. Each week they bring music from the Latinx artists from across the Americas they love. For Pride Month, Vero and Miriam highlight queer Latinx musicians and allies in their Algo Gay (Something Gay) episode. Be ready for some bachata, gay rage and tropical vibes.

2. I’m always finding joy and thought-provoking reflections in visual artist Julio Salgado’s Illegal Blog. Salgado is the co-founder of DreamersAdrift and the migrant storytelling manager for The Center for Cultural Power. His status as an undocumented, queer ‘artivist’ has fueled the contents of his visual art, which depict key individuals and moments of the DREAM Act and the migrant rights movement. His blog offers insightful and witty reflections from a personal point of view.

3. Felix Ever After is a wonderful young adult novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time. This easy-to-read and powerful novel by Kacen Callender, a Stonewall Honor Book and Lambda Award-winning author, makes evident the joys and challenges of navigating our gender identity self-discovery.

4. For those of us invested in practicing the future we want to see, I recommend Prentis Hemphill’s Finding Our Way podcast. Hemphill is a writer, healer, teacher and Somatics practitioner, and in this podcast they dive into embodiment, boundaries, harm, creativity and more with people who are working to reshape this world. This isn’t a podcast about answers. It is an exploration into ourselves and the skills we need to create and embody the world we want. I highly recommend these two episodes: Remembering with Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Breaking Binaries and Intersex Justice with Sean Saifa Wall.