Alaina Leary

When I survived a rape on campus in 2012, my life began to revolve around a singular question: How do I survive? What does it mean to be a survivor? Who will I become now? This article contains references to sexual assault and harassment which may…

Walk into a bookstore during Pride Month and you will probably see at least one rainbow-colored display featuring books with LGBTQIA+ characters. And in that display, you will probably spot more queer girl young adult books than you would have just…

When writer Marisa Bardach Ramel was 17 and a senior in high school, her mom, Sally, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given a prognosis of two to six months to live. One of her doctors had more optimistic hopes: Sally might live another 10…

What does "an American boy" look like? According to Esquire's March 2019 cover, he's Ryan Morgan, a white high school senior from Wisconsin. He can't remember what #MeToo means (“I’ve heard of that,” he says. “What does it mean again?”), even though…

For asexual (or ace) readers, sexual attraction in a book can — quite literally — be a turn off. “Lots of romance plots don't make sense to me because of the element of sex or physical attraction at play,” says Kaley, 24, an editor of speculative…

A Black teen with a chronic digestive condition writes a love advice column. A bruja falls in love with a trans altar boy. Two Bay Area teen girls meet because of cranky customer service and a disdain for our tech-obsessed world. These are the kinds…

Before my now-fiancé Macey and I started dating — back when we were just friends and I had an inkling of a secret crush on her — we were at the beach with her family one August weekend. It was three years after Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight was…

On the first day of second grade, Mrs. P asked everyone to go around the room and tell the class what we’d done over summer break. “My family went to California,” someone said. Another kid talked about trips to Six Flags, Canobie Lake Park, and…

If you search "queer women young adult books" on Google, the top result is a book list compiled by Autostraddle. When I was a queer teenager, lists like these barely existed and when they did, they usually weren't in highly visible magazines and…

When was the last time you read a book with an LGBTQIA+ protagonist whose identity wasn’t defined by their romantic relationships to other people? Or what about a book with a disabled protagonist who was single — and not absolutely miserable? It’s…

In December of 2017, autistic advocate and YouTuber Amythest Schaber started the #BoycottToSiri hashtag as a reaction to the widely criticized memoir To Siri With Love by Judith Newman, a book written by a neurotypical woman about her relationship…

I love a good historical fantasy, so I picked up The Gentlemen’s Guide to Vice and Virtue on the day that it was published, because I have been dying to read something more than non-canonically romantic subtext between queer characters before the…

From The Devil Wears Prada to Gilmore Girls to Freeform’s new show The Bold Type, the media has a lot of influence over cultural understanding of journalism, and women’s magazines and media companies in particular. While serious films like Spotlight…

The movement for more diverse books is nothing new, and if you’re a reader who supports more diverse books and authors, you may be left wondering: What can I do? We often see the same books on bookstore and library shelves that we see reviews of in…

In second grade, I spent almost every day in Mrs. S’s reading room. Tuesdays and Thursdays were our “official” days, but I’d find almost any reason I could to get out of class, walk down the twisting hallways of Ferryway Elementary, and be…

I still remember the first time I was really introduced to diverse books in a systematic, purposeful way. I was in seventh grade, and my English teacher was Ms. Facey, a black woman who wore her long hair in braids and used her hands a lot. She was…