Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor and professor Dr. Seema Yasmin’s The ABCs of Queer History (Workman Kids; Hardcover; $18.99) takes readers ages 5 and up beyond simple ABC words to explore what it means to be accepting, brave, compassionate and inclusive. The picture book introduces a different kind of ABCs—not just words like apple, ball or cat, but rather what it means to be diverse, to be equitable, and to be inclusive.
The book was released on April 30 and was illustrated by Lucy Kirk.
The ABC’s of Queer History celebrates both joyful and challenging moments in queer history in the United States through rhyming verse and illustrations.
“As a queer, Muslim author who so needed this book as a little girl, I am delighted to share a joyous, affirming, celebratory and honest picture book about queer icons, queer people’s contributions to society, and all the ways we exist in the world,” Yasmin said in a press release.
This is a book of people, of ideas, of accomplishments and events. The book covers Allies and Ancestors, about Belonging and Being accepted; it is about Hope, Knowledge, and Love.
Queer History also covers historic moments like Stonewall and Trailblazers like Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Harvey Milk, Barbara Jordan, George Takei, Elliot Page and Sally Ride.
Even adults might take away some new queer knowledge from Yasmin’s book.
Yasmin is the director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative, clinical assistant professor in Stanford University’s Department of Medicine, and visiting professor at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA where she teaches crisis management and communications. Yasmin was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news in 2017 with a team from The Dallas Morning News, and she is the recipient of two awards from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
She has been featured in and contributed to The New York Times, Rolling Stone, WIRED, Scientific American, and other outlets. She is a medical analyst for CNN and a correspondent for Conde Nast Entertainment. Her books paint vivid pictures about ourselves and how we interact with the world around us and include What the Fact?!: Finding the Truth in All the Noise, Muslim Women are Everything, the poetry collection If God Is a Virus and more.
