. @malindalo's Last Night at the Telegraph Club comes out today! I've read every book she's written in one sitting and I'm sure this one will be no different! I also want to tell you about Malinda in case you don't know her. https://twitter.com/autostraddle/status/1351555520168140808

I worked for Malinda at the first LGBTQ website I wrote for, and she made a bigger impact on me than any boss I've ever had. Her standards were uncompromising in every way. She was always pushing me to think bigger and more critically. To read read read more than I wrote.

And she was the first person to tell me that I absolutely had to expand my knowledge outside of my very white, very rural southern upbringing if I was going to make the impact I wanted to make on the community.

She encouraged me to embrace who I was and where I was from, and also to reach for knowledge as far as my brain would go. She helped me learn to differentiate between internet noise and valid criticism. She admonished me to engage with fair criticism with an open heart and mind.

I learned so much watching her. She didn't take no for an answer, joining the Television Critics Association and getting the room to ask tough questions about diversity when hardly anyone else was doing it. She interviewed Lena Headey in a photobooth!

Malinda absolutely refused to publish a list of anything of the majority of people or shows or movies on it were white, and this was in 2008! When things were MUCH less diverse than they are now, and we STILL have a long way to go.

Malinda loves stories, especially LGBTQ+ stories, and I was over-the-moon happy for her when she left the world of criticism to create her own. She has shaped storytelling in so many industries in ways you'll never see or know. I'll read every book she writes forever!