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Trans Stories

In these books, artists take starkly different approaches to share stories of transgender individuals and communities. Spanning modes from documentary photography to experimental fiction to a collection of postcards between a transitioning son and his mother, these books offer a broad and deep reflection of gender transition experiences and transgender lives. 

How to Transition on 63 Cents a Day How to Transition on 63 cents a Day

Leopoldo Bloom
How to Transition on 63 Cents a Day
[Portland, Oregon]: [Leopoldo Bloom], [2013]

How to Transition… chronicles the artist’s transition from female to male and his move from New York City to Portland, Oregon, in a collection of thirty postcards to his mother. The non-linear narrative, the inclusion of ephemera, and the postcard format give it a blend of playfulness and deep intimacy that invites the reader into the artist’s experience.

Purchased using funds from the Boone Domestic Architecture Endowment.

UNC Library Catalog: https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb8526021

Eduardo Hernández Santos
El Muro = The Wall
Florence, Mass.: Red Trillium Press, [2009]

El Muro: The Wall consists of triptychs of photographs of the nighttime trans and queer scene at Havana’s famed seafront boulevard, the Malecón, layered with text by Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera. “I’m now sharing with you a reality that is also part of Cuba… one that reveals the inner essence of people who struggle to define and defend their right to be themselves, to have a space of their own.” (Quotation from the artist’s afterword.) 

UNC Library Catalog: https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb5944456

Clarissa Sligh
Wrongly Bodied
Philadelphia, PA: Leeway Foundation, c2009

Sligh’s book pairs the gender transition experience of a contemporary white man named Jake with the story of a 19th-century Black woman, Ellen Craft, who passed as a white, slave-owning man. “In Wrongly Bodied, I place Jake’s story and the Crafts’ narrative side by side. No attempt was made to intermingle or align them, yet resonances between the two occur throughout.” (Quotation from the artist’s website.)

Purchased using funds from the T. Henry and Penelope Clarke Library Fund in honor of Margaret Bland Clarke.

UNC Library Catalog: https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb6041663

Sylvan Oswald and Jessica Fleischmann
High Winds
South Pasadena, CA: X Artists' Books, [2017]

Oswald’s text and Fleischmann’s visual design combine to tell the story of High Winds, a young man on a hallucinatory road trip through the West in search of his half-brother. “Gas stations, local legends, and unlikely rock formations become terrain for explorations of fear, fantasy, masculinity, medication, spatial structures, and bodily functions—inspired by the author’s experience of gender transition, insomnia, and moving to Los Angeles.” (Quotation from the publisher’s website.) 

Purchased using funds from the T. Henry and Penelope Clarke Library Fund in honor of Margaret Bland Clarke.

UNC Library Catalog: https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb9127929