Books

Well known for hir hard hitting raw writing style  Sassafras’ words have been included in a variety of anthologies including Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Trans/Love and many others chronicling everything from hir experiences as a queer teenager to leather community.

Perhaps best known for hir groundbreaking anthology Kicked Out which has been twice honored by the American Library Association and was a Lambda Literary Finalist brought together the voices of current and former homeless LGBTQ youth.   The anthology was first conceptualized when three days after being kicked out for the final time the then seventeen year old Sassafras went to the public library in semi-rural Oregon looking for answers.  Ze looked at every book shelved under “homosexuality” and found nothing that talked about anything close to what ze was experiencing. That day ze made a promise to hirself that if ze survived ze would create a book so that no other queer kid would ever feel as alone and isolated as ze felt that day.

Sassafras’ much anticipated debut novel Roving Pack  released to much acclaim in autumn 2012. Set in an underground world of homeless queer teens, readers follow the daily life of Click, a straight-edge transgender kid searching for community, identity, and connection amidst chaos. As Roving Pack unfolds, we meet a pack of newly sober gender rebels creating art, families and drama in dilapidated punk houses across Portland, Oregon circa 2002.  Roving Pack offers fast-paced in-your-face accounts of leather, sex, hormones, house parties, and protests. But, when gender fluidity takes an unexpected turn, the pack is sent reeling. Lambda Literary calls Roving Pack “Political, raucous, dark, and totally engrossing” and the Huffington Post says  is Roving Pack is “a guiding light in the darkness of the false binary illusion of gender we’ve been too lazy to address”

Sassafras is also the editor of Leather Ever After  BDSM focused retellings of fairytales which released in January 2013.