Hello and Welcome Back to Our Hobbies Our Shelves, a new A+ series where we take you on a tour of our home libraries. There's photos, and stories, and thoughts about what goes behind the books we love — there's also a detailed spreadsheet, crafted and organized like we are the librarians of our own lives. A damned delight!
So let's get to it, shall we?
Notes on Organization Scheme
Once upon a time, I organized books by logic. There was a shelf for each subsection (Black fiction before before the 2000s, Black fiction after the 2000s, feminist theory was broken down by wave, all the things). This was especially true when I was a PhD student, but my how times have changed!
Now my books are organized by what I can best describe as... feeling? B...
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Carmen Phillips is Autostraddle's former editor in chief. She began at Autostraddle in 2017 as a freelance team writer and worked her way up through the company, eventually becoming the EIC from 2021-2024. A Black Puerto Rican feminist writer with a PhD in American Studies from New York University, Carmen specializes in writing about Blackness, race, queerness, politics, culture, and the many ways we find community and connection with each other. During her time at Autostraddle, Carmen focused on pop culture, TV and film reviews, criticism, interviews, and news analysis. She claims many past homes, but left the largest parts of her heart in Detroit, Brooklyn, and Buffalo, NY. And there were several years in her early 20s when she earnestly slept with a copy of James Baldwin’s “Fire Next Time” under her pillow. To reach out, you can find Carmen on Twitter, Instagram, or her website.
Carmen has written 716 articles for us.
