Writer, television host and transgender rights activist Janet Mock came to the spotlight in a 2011 Marie Claire article in which she detailed the struggles and triumphs she faced as a transgender girl growing up in Hawaii, traveling to Bangkok for gender reassignment surgery. She is a producer and interviewer for HBO’s The Trans List, author of New York Times best selling “Redefining Realness,” and author of the forthcoming memoir about life in her twenties. As she told Rookie Mag, “[Reading] prompted me to get a library card and just sit among those stacks and read books by women who looked like my self-image. That was important to me, because [those women] lived the life that I saw myself living one day, as a black woman.”
Below are Janet Mock’s favorite books, available to purchase as a set or individually.