Day 16: Mayra Cuevas & Marie Marquardt
Okay so this is cheating, but they're co-authors of multiple books together, and there's no way for me to separate their contributions... I've already got too many authors I'd like to list, so why not?
I read their book "Does My Body Offend You?" and absolutely loved it; it's a celebration of teen activism while also being a deep exploration of feminist issues through practical situations that bring out the complicated side of things, which the authors refuse to reduce back to a simple formulaic answer. It has a supporting cast of appropriately-complex male characters that help in exploring the nuances of issues like the line between female empowerment & male gratification, and it brings race and macho culture into the conversion as well.
CW for sexual harassment & deep discussion of the resultant trauma.
I'll cheat again here to sneak in mention of two male authors whose work resonates with theirs: Mark Oshiro's "Anger is a Gift" has a more pessimistic/complex take on teen activism along with a gay romance (CW for racist cop murder), while Jeremy Whitley's graphic novel "Navigating With You" deals with queer romance & disability, while having a main character pairing that echoes those from "Does My Body Offend You?" in a lot of ways. Another connection (to non-men authors this time) is with "Go With the Flow" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Their graphic novel about teen activism and periods is a bit more didactic and has a much lighter tone, but it does necessarily have some overlapping themes.
To bring it back to Cuevas & Marquhardt, their writing is great and their ability to discuss such complex topics with such nuance, all wrapped up in a story that feels completely natural, is amazing to me, and makes their book feel like one of the most valuable to recommend to others.
In writing this I've realized a grave oversight in the list so far that I'll have to correct tomorrow, but I'm quickly running out of days. The didn't-quite-make-it list is going to be full of more excellent authors, and I'm honestly starting to wonder whether it might actually be harder to name 20 male authors I respect now that I've found the sense to be mostly somewhere between disgusted and disappointed with so many of the male authors I enjoyed as a teen.
#20AuthorsNoMen (cheating a bit)
arxiv_authors: Arxiv authors (1993-2003)
Scientific collaborations between authors of papers submitted to arxiv.org, under 5 categories: gr-qc, astro-ph, cond-mat, hep-ph, and hep-th categories, spanning January 1993 to April 2003. If an author i co-authored a paper with author j, the graph contains a undirected edge from i to j. If the paper is co-authored by k authors this generates a completely connected (sub)graph on k nodes.
This network has 26197 nodes and 28980 edges.
Newsroom union members at the Los Angeles Times vote to authorize a strike as they raise the pressure for a new contract after three years of negotiations (Katie Kilkenny/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business
Raiders coach Pete Carroll to address media after practice https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/raiders/raiders-coach-pete-carroll-to-address-media-after-practice-3535805/
Kaffe minskar risken för återkommande hjärtflimmer https://traningslara.se/kaffe-minskar-risken-for-aterkommande-hjartflimmer/
Bidirectional Representations Augmented Autoregressive Biological Sequence Generation:Application in De Novo Peptide Sequencing
Xiang Zhang, Jiaqi Wei, Zijie Qiu, Sheng Xu, Zhi Jin, ZhiQiang Gao, Nanqing Dong, Siqi Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08169
Do All Autoregressive Transformers Remember Facts the Same Way? A Cross-Architecture Analysis of Recall Mechanisms
Minyeong Choe, Haehyun Cho, Changho Seo, Hyunil Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08778
lkml_reply: Linux kernel reply network
A network of replies among email address found on the Linux kernel mailing list. Nodes are email addresses and each directed edge represents a reply from email address i to email address j. The date of this snapshot is uncertain.
This network has 63399 nodes and 1096440 edges.
Tags: Social, Communication, Unweighted, Multigraph, Timestamps
Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen