Niko Stratis

A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.

When Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky was infamously criticized as “dad rock,” Niko Stratis was a twenty-five-year-old closeted trans woman working in her dad’s glass shop in the Yukon Territory. As she sought escape from her hypermasculine environment, Stratis found an unlikely lifeline amid dad rock’s emotionally open and honest music. Listening to dad rock, Stratis could access worlds beyond her own and imagine a path forward.

In taut, searing essays rendered in propulsive and unguarded prose, Stratis delves into the emotional core of bands like Wilco and The National, telling her story through the dad rock that accompanied her along the way. She found footing in Michael Stipe’s allusions to queer longing, Radiohead’s embrace of unknowability, and Bruce Springsteen’s very trans desire to “change my clothes my hair my face”—and she found in artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten that the label transcends gender. A love letter to the music that saves us and a tribute to dads like Stratis’s own who embody the tenderness at the genre’s heart, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman rejoices in music unafraid to bare its soul.

The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman

Tuck Woodstock

2 TRANS 2 FURIOUS is a trans-made anthology of Fast & Furious content. Created in the noble tradition of the fanzine, this book features 40+ personal essays, short stories, comics, poems, illustrations, and other works created by a wide array of trans and nonbinary contributors. Read on to discover: an electrifying new short story by Manhunt author Gretchen Felker-Martin; the scoop on the franchise's little-known canonically nonbinary character; a demolition derby driver's perspective on 2 Fast 2 Furious's derby scene; an essay contemplating the queer symbolism of Cipher's bowl cut; instructions for a Fast & Furious-themed tabletop roleplaying game; a poem written by the US/Mexico border, allegedly; bingo cards; a walking tour; acrostic poetry; classic zine collages; and so much more...

Niko Stratis

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