Books like Iconoclasm — picked by fans

As a queer person from a once-colonized country, I have long had an interest in struggles for emancipation and liberation. My scholarly work has been invested in understanding how structures of oppression sediment over time, and how time itself can be less than straightforward. The time we call the present is haunted by the past but also by anticipations of the future. My work explores how this temporal slipperiness makes itself felt in contemporary struggles around nation, gender, sexuality, race, and caste. As a scholar of international politics, I am interested in how yearnings for freedom manifest in different places and look to each other for inspiration and solidarity. 

As a queer person from a once-colonized country, I have long had an interest in struggles for emancipation and liberation. My scholarly work has been invested in understanding how structures of oppression sediment over time, and how time itself can be less than straightforward. The time we call the present is haunted by the past but also by anticipations of the future. My work explores how this temporal slipperiness makes itself felt in contemporary struggles around nation, gender, sexuality, race, and caste. As a scholar of international politics, I am interested in how yearnings for freedom manifest in different places and look to each other for inspiration and solidarity. 

As a queer person from a once-colonized country, I have long had an interest in struggles for emancipation and liberation. My scholarly work has been invested in understanding how structures of oppression sediment over time, and how time itself can be less than straightforward. The time we call the present is haunted by the past but also by anticipations of the future. My work explores how this temporal slipperiness makes itself felt in contemporary struggles around nation, gender, sexuality, race, and caste. As a scholar of international politics, I am interested in how yearnings for freedom manifest in different places and look to each other for inspiration and solidarity. 

As a queer person from a once-colonized country, I have long had an interest in struggles for emancipation and liberation. My scholarly work has been invested in understanding how structures of oppression sediment over time, and how time itself can be less than straightforward. The time we call the present is haunted by the past but also by anticipations of the future. My work explores how this temporal slipperiness makes itself felt in contemporary struggles around nation, gender, sexuality, race, and caste. As a scholar of international politics, I am interested in how yearnings for freedom manifest in different places and look to each other for inspiration and solidarity. 

When I was 12, I was given The Book of Questions by Neruda Pablo. “Tell me, is the rose naked or is that her only dress?” It was the perfect book for me, with an abundance of questions. As I got older, the questions turned more serious: what are these forces restricting women to a narrow strip of being? To a slim wedge of psychological existence? How did the definition of female pare down to only a fistful of traits—nurturing, accommodating, object of desire, etc.? I’ve found solace in books, with fully dimensional female characters who refuse society’s common assumptions. It’s these females I try to create in my work. 

Following several years of working for the Ohio State University and Marathon Oil, I co-founded and became CEO of Solomon Software, originally named TLB, Inc. (The Lord’s Business) headquartered in Findlay, Ohio. We grew to more than 400 employees and $60 million in revenue, servicing over 40,000 clients worldwide, and then sold our company to Great Plains Software and that combined business was sold to Microsoft six months later. I later established Solomon Cloud Solutions, a technology consulting service firm for Microsoft Independent Software Vendors and Microsoft Business Solutions Channel Partners. Now, I assist businesses and organizations with implementing leadership development systems that will help them grow with a company called LeadFirst.ai.

My literary interest began in childhood when my love for rhyme encouraged me to write limericks and poems. In 2009, my first novel, An Ordinary Life was published, which I considered to be a therapeutic exercise to see where it would lead, and here I am, much wiser, but still learning. Becoming an author has greatly enhanced my appreciation of the written word and how powerful it can be, hence, my book choices – a personal literary journey.  

I am an archaeologist, mostly working in the Roman period. Until I retired in 2011, I was the Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Artefact Studies and Reader in Roman Material Culture at Newcastle University, having previously been the Director of Archaeological Museums for the University. My working life started by specialising in identifying those small items which come out of every excavation, but more and more I became interested in what those artefacts told us about the people who lived on the site. Reading books about peoples’ lives in other cultures and periods provides insight into those people of the past for whom we have little documentary evidence.

My father was an artist who painted passionately, almost always outdoors. When I told him I wanted to become an art historian, he was sad partly because he hated art historians, but mainly because he imagined me chained (as a writer) to a desk, rather than marching the countryside looking for things to paint or draw. Like most writers, I sometimes get seriously bogged down, and his sadness comes back to haunt me. But then I pick up a book that, in just a few pages, puts my writing back on track, gladdening my father’s ghost.

My name is Bri Bruce, writing as B. L. Bruce, and am an award-winning poet and Pushcart prize nominee from California. Over the last decade and a half, my work has appeared in dozens of literary publications. I am the author of four books and Editor-in-Chief of nature-centric magazine Humana Obscura. I was raised with a wildlife biologist/avid gardener for a mother and a forestry major/backpacker/fisherman as a father. Both my parents instilled in me at a young age a love of nature. A lifetime spent outdoors inspires my work—so much so that I’ve been called a “poetic naturalist” and the “heiress of Mary Oliver.”