I fell in love with Dean Atta’s work when he released a poem called How To Be Gay in the Proud anthology by Stripes. I found it to be the story that i connected with the most in the anthology and the way it was written was right up my street. When i found out that Dean would be releasing a verse novel called The Black Flamingo, i jumped at the chance to get hold of the book ASAP.
You may have noticed that we had a read-along running across our social medias between the 11th and the 22nd of March. This was all in aid of celebrating the wonderful release of Proud, a new LGBTQ+ anthology from Stripes, which was curated by Juno Dawson and includes a whole host of great YA authors and some wonderful illustrators.
We were asked by Charlie at Stripes Publishing to be a part of the blog tour for Proud. Blog Tours are not something we get involved with a whole bunch anymore, but how could we pass up the opportunity to talk about one of our favourite books of the last year?
The book discussed in this post was gifted from the publisher.
Last summer, Stripes announced their new anthology, curated by the absolute queen of YA fiction, Juno Dawson. We went to see their cover reveal at YALC last year for the anthology and that definitely got us even more excited for the release of Proud. Myself and Sophie are huge fans and supporters of Stripes. They have some wonderful books and authors under their belt, and i am always excited to see what they’re releasing next.
The last weekend in January was a really fun one for us, filled with loads of bookish things. A few months ago, we got invited to the Stripes EqualiTea event. The event was to promote Proud, their new LGBTQ+ anthology, along with some other exciting releases that Stripes have in store for us in 2019. As soon as we got invited, we jumped on the chance to go. The following day, we also had our semi-regular meeting with the Manchester Bloggers group. It was an incredibly bookish weekend.
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