Our Work Is Everywhere

A visually stunning graphic non-fiction book on queer and trans resistance.

Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real, and imagined queer and trans communities.

In their own words, queer and trans organizers, artists, healers, comrades, and leaders speak honestly and authentically about their own experiences with power, love, pain, and magic to create a textured and nuanced portrait of queer and trans realities in America. The many themes include Black femme mental health, Pacific Islander authorship, fat queer performance art, disability and health care practice, sex worker activism, and much more. Accompanying the narratives are Rose’s startling and sinuous images that brings these leaders’ words to visual life.

Our Work Is Everywhere is a graphic non-fiction book that underscores the brilliance and passion of queer and trans resistance.

Includes a foreword by Lambda Literary Award-winning author and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.

Full-colour throughout.

AUTHOR

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Winner of the 2012 Lambda Literary Award, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, teacher and performer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan, Roma and Irish ascent. The author of Bodymap, Love Cake and Consensual Genocide and the co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, her writing has been widely anthologized. She is the co-founder of the queer people of colour arts incubator Mangos With Chili, a lead artist with Sins Invalid and co-founder of Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School. In 2010 she was named one of the Feminist Press’ 40 Feminists Under 40 Shaping the Future. Her first memoir, Dirty River, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in fall 2015.


AUTHOR

Syan Rose

Syan Rose is an illustrator and comic artist whose work plays with both surrealist and representational imagery to approach topics of personal history, politics, accountability, and healing. She’s been published in Bitch, Slate, Gay Magazine, Truthout, and Autostraddle, and has self-produced many comics and zines.

Reviews

Reading this beautiful collection of oral histories and interviews feels likes sitting down with a bunch of rad queer and trans artists, healers, and activists, and listening to them talk about what inspires them, angers them, fuels them. The art is truly unique – each page feels like its own work of art. Here you’ll find stories about ancestral wisdom, the power of queer tarot, mutual aid organizations, community gardening initiatives, radical wealth redistribution, and so much more more. It’s an inspiring book spilling over with LGBTQ+ brilliance and creativity. –Book Riot


An inspirational volume for current and aspiring queer community workers to ‘keep showing up’ to build a better world together. –Publishers Weekly


Syan Rose is an artist who is deeply dedicated to the narratives of her Queer and Trans communities. In Our Work Is Everywhere, Sarah transforms the comics genre into short form poetic portraits of her peers and elders with such tenderness, love, and reverence. -Jessica de Jesus, creative director at Bitch Media


This genre-bending anthology about queer and trans resistance packs a big punch for a short book. It moves between interviews, essays, conversations, and more, all accompanied by Rose’s intricate, expansive illustrations. Containing both rage and celebration, the book explores topics such as Black femme mental health, sex worker activism, and queer fat performance art. –Autostraddle (“Best Queer Books of the Year”)


With this honest exploration of the lives of some of the most marginalized people in society, Syan Rose has crafted an artwork that is profoundly moving and inspiring. –BOMB


Our Work Is Everywhere embodies its own name, as every page offers wisdom everywhere; whether we are taking in narratives of resistance and survival from across the queer community; or witnessing the visual spectacle that holds every word in handwritten text and illustrations. From surviving class warfare and structural oppression, to allowing our bodies to experience the tender calm that queer resistance begs for, Our Work Is Everywhere is a collection of interviews, stories, and lessons on reworking and rewriting power. -Cristy Road Carrera, author and artist, Next World Tarot and Spit and Passion


A unique, empowering addition to LGBTQ+ literature. –Kirkus Reviews


In this collection, Syan Rose has created full, lovely and sensitively drawn portraits of the humans who set the world aright. -Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood, and Brothers of the Gun with Marwan Hisham

Awards

  • Lambda Literary Award 2022, Short-listed
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    Details

    Dimensions:

    92 Pages
    12.00in * 9.00in * .25in
    540.00gr

    Published:

    March 01, 2021

    Publisher:

    Arsenal Pulp Press

    ISBN:

    9781551528151

    Language:

    eng

    Other Titles by Syan Rose

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