Kerry Shatzer gets ready to unbox the first copies of his new puzzle book
From Staff Reports
Looking for a fun new diversion? These days, who isn’t. Puzzle guru Kerry Shatzer has just what you need: His new, first-of-its-kind book, Queer Pride Puzzles: Volume One, is now available for pre-order on Amazon and should be hitting shelves on April 23.
Queer Pride Puzzles: Volume One — Shatzer’s second book, following DIVERSIONS: Word Searches Volume One, published in 2021 — is a collection of variety puzzles, all with LGBTQ themes and answers. It includes word searches, quotation puzzles, logic problems, mini-crosswords, visual puzzles, mazes and queer twists on classic puzzles.
Solving the puzzles reveals the names of a wide spectrum of LGBTQ people, including award-winning actors and actresses, athletes from every sport, politicians, business leaders, news and media journalists/personalities, musicians and authors of every genre, scientists, astronauts, activists, historical figures and more.
“It’s a window into an education most of us have never received in school,” Shatzer said.
“With a renewed assault against our community, it’s more important than ever that we come together and show pride in our accomplishments and history while having fun.”
Shatzer has been a puzzle fan all his life and has been making puzzles on and off for decades. In the early Internet days, he created the Web Word Search Plus, one of the first online collections of printable word searches and mazes — all of which are archived and still available.
In St. Louis in the 1990s he made his first LGBTQ-themed puzzles for the Vital Voice and Slam! Magazine, where his Namedropping puzzle first appeared. He contributed five original mazes to Charles Timmerman’s 2018 Funster Activity Book for Adults. While unemployed during the COVID pandemic, Shatzer had time to create his first self-published puzzle book, DIVERSIONS: Word Searches Volume One, which is available on Amazon. It was around that sane time he became an occasional word search contributor to the national magazine Games World of Puzzles and that he started creating his Diversions LGBTQ word search puzzles that run the second Saturday of each month in Dallas Voice.
His word searches can also be found in Colorado’s Out Front Magazine and in South Florida’s OutSFL magazine where his QueerDoku puzzle made its debut.
Find more of Shatzer’s puzzles at his new website, DiversionsPuzzles.net and on Facebook at Facebook.com/DiversionsPuzzles.
Find his newest book online at Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com, Bookshop.org and BookBaby.com. A limited number of copies are also now available at both the Oak Cliff and East Dallas locations of the independent bookstore Lucky Dog Books.