The Outburst Book Group is back in-person for the first time this year on Sunday 17th July at 3pm facilitated by local writer Mícheál McCann

From new novels to queer classics, we read books that are a great conversation starter around queer experience and ideas, about where we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going. We meet once a month and you can come every time or just once if you fancy it.

It’s totally FREE and everyone is welcome, no special knowledge needed! You just need to read the book in advance.

If you can’t find or afford the book, just email participate@outburstarts.com and we’ll sort something.

This time we’re reading LOT by Bryan Washington – an entralling collection of interelated short stories about a young gay man finding his place “with soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life“.

Venue is the Outburst HQ in Belfast City Centre, full details when you book your place via our website, link in bio.

(Venue has wheelchair access, all gender loo and free refreshments)

Any questions, feel free to drop us a message. See you there!

In the city of Houston – a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America – the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He’s working at his family’s restaurant, weathering his brother’s blows, resenting his older sister’s absence. And discovering he likes boys.

This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston’s myriad neighborhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman’s affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington’s brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

Here, kitty kitty! Have you been feeling the queer lit itch that you just can’t scratch? Outburst’s stunning Reading Group and Book Group returns this year facilitated by your friendly neighbourhood queer poet extraordinaire, Mícheál McCann!

Details about our Book Group will be announced shortly, but for those not in the know, our Reading Group is where once a month, we dig into theories that help us to see the world around us, and our place in it, in a different way.

We’re kicking this group off on 15th June at 7:00pm – 8:30pm online with a chapter from Shon Faye’s stunning work “The Transgender Issue”, debunking the media frenzy of transphobic hit pieces and asking us where we begin to understand what it means to be trans in the UK.

“Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war ‘issue’. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country’s population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized ‘debate’ which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice.

In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the ‘transgender issue’ to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.

The Transgender Issue is a landmark work that signals the beginning of a new, healthier conversation about trans life. It is a manifesto for change, and a call for justice and solidarity between all marginalized people and minorities. Trans liberation, as Faye sees it, goes to the root of what our society is and what it could be; it offers the possibility of a more just, free and joyful world for all of us.”

The reading group is free and open to all, but there are limited places. So book now!