Q & A with Eli Sachse

July 07, 2026

We catch up with the author of Next-Level Ally: How to Support Your Queer and Transgender Friends, now in paperback!

Eli Sachse, BSN, RN is a queer, transgender artist, author, and activist. He is the founder of LGBTQ Merced, GLSEN Merced, and the Merced Pride Center at the MAC. He has worked as a freelance writer for MyHealthTeam.com and Sonoma Medicine, and is the author of the zines Sex Without Roles and Next-Level Ally.

We caught up with Eli just after the spring release of Next-Level Ally, once a best-selling zine, now a full-length paperback. Want to know how they became a writer, or started in advocacy work, or what their favorite book genre is? Keep reading!

What inspired you to write your book?

I’ve been organizing and advocating for queer and transgender people in my rural California community of Merced since 2018. Things that I’ve seen and experienced while trying to interface with local government, school systems, and allies of varying levels of commitment have been disorienting and mind-boggling, to say the least. So, some of this book was an exercise for me in deconstructing and understanding my own experiences. From gaslighting, to big promises that evaporate without a sound, to just plain rejection of ideas and plans by leadership, it’s been quite a journey.

For example, I worked for Merced County for two years. Near the end of those two years, I approached my director about starting a pride affinity group for county employees. She actually sent an email to me with a sentence in all-caps forbidding me from trying. I still have trouble understanding why she would feel so strongly against the idea. Starting an internal affinity group would not even necessarily even be visible to the public, ever. Where would any controversy come from? To me, it seems like the most low-stakes step towards pride activities possible. I still don’t see what she thinks the dangers are by allowing me to organize a pride group at work.

Alongside that, I’ve worked with people who have turned out to be meaningful allies, and continue doing real work and speaking up for queer and trans folks in my community. Thinking about how they approach the problem differently is just something I do naturally, so writing about it just made sense to me.

Also, being as visibly out as I am, I am approached by people of all walks of life and working in every industry for advice on how to better support queer and trans people. People quickly identify me as a kind ear to hear the questions they might be afraid to ask others, so talking with would-be allies has just become part of my life, for better or worse.

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Next-Level Ally: How to Support Your Queer and Transgender Friends

June 04, 2026

Speak up, take action, and protect your community

How do you show up for the LGBTQ+ people in your life? You’ve figured out pronouns, you vote, and you don’t say hateful things, but you have a lot of unanswered questions and the strong feeling that you could be doing more. You’re committed to educating yourself, but where to start?

Author and activist Eli Sachse has created a practical guide to being a better friend, family member, partner, colleague, and community member to your trans and queer friends. With anti-queer and trans bias and oppression on the rise, it’s more important than ever for allies to step up with radical empathy. Allyship is a skill that anyone can learn, and Sachse is a kind, clear teacher.

With a focus on direct and effective communication, Sachse has filled this book with real-world examples for everyday people. Learn when and how to speak up at work and online without doing more harm than good. Create more inclusive conversations and challenge misgendering and harmful jokes. Learn to see and question your own implicit biases and assumptions. Celebrate and affirm your friends. Become a better friend, manager, or parent. Volunteer, march, and create true safe spaces. Further chapters advise people working in health and mental health professionals, educators, and law enforcement in how to do better by the trans and queer people they serve.

Read on for an excerpt from Next-Level Ally, shipping now from our site and available everywhere you find Microcosm titles!

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How to Defend Books and Why: Book Bans and How We Fight Them

March 20, 2026

From Ginsberg’s Howl to libraries, from prisons to Palestine

You’re invited to the book revolution!

Fight back against censorship and empower your community with this close look at the book banning movement.

In a moving, compulsively readable call to arms for readers everywhere, Danny Caine, bestselling author of How to Resist Amazon and Why and How to Protect Bookstores and Why, offers an expertly-crafted confrontation of far-right, Christian nationalist attempts to reshape American culture through ban campaigns targeting schools, libraries, bookstores, and prisons, with the aim to silence marginalized identities in life and in literature.

From the first-ever banned books display at San Francisco’s City Lights in the 1950s to the rapid rise of so-called Moms For Liberty during the COVID-19 pandemic to attempts to silence Palestinian authors, Caine charts the course of repressive censorship campaigns, along with the creative and sometimes unlikely activists who’ve stood up against them. Each chapter is based on a particular book banning episode, bolstered by research and legal precedent, and concludes with helpful takeaways for further reading or resistance. Throughout, Caine approaches these heated issues with gentle openness harkening back to his work as a public school teacher and a bookseller. He emphasizes our collective responsibility towards art, free speech, and each other.

Keep reading for an excerpt from Danny Caine’s How to Defend Books and Why, available now through our site or arriving on indie shelves near you on 6/2/26!

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The Burning Rage of a Dying Planet (with Craig Rosebraugh) | A People’s Guide to Publishing

August 15, 2024

Craig Rosebraugh, author of “Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: The FBI vs. the Earth Liberation Front” sits down with us to talk about how he became the spokesperson for the ELF, the FBI faking a book deal to gain intel, and publishing controversial materials.

Check out Craig’s book on our website.

Here’s a link to a (free) NYT article about Craig and the FBI.

Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
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Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: The FBI vs. the Earth Liberation Front

June 17, 2024

An insider’s view of radical environmentalism

Since the mid-1990s, the secretive cell organization calling itself the Earth Liberation Front (ELF, or Elves) has waged a brazen campaign of property damage and arson attacks against entities they hold responsible for environmental destruction, including timber companies, ski resorts, slaughterhouses, and car dealerships.

In Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: The FBI vs. the Earth Liberation Front, former ELF spokesperson Craig Rosebraugh charts the history and ideology of the ELF, as well as the repression strategies the government uses to destroy activist movements—including tactics we continue to see wielded against global liberation movements today. Rosenbraugh himself was the subject of a shocking New York Times article last year detailing the efforts of an informant connected to the FBI and the CIA to draw him into a book contract designed never to reach publication, but which provided authorities the opportunity to comb his drafts for clues that might help them apprehend ELF conspirators. Rosenbraugh, though, only ever transmitted anonymous communiques, and when he made a discovery about the man posing as his “book packager” that he writes “made my heart race, made my breath vanish, and sent me off to gather every weapon I had in my house,” the project came to an uneasy end.

Luckily, Rosenbraugh was still determined to let his story see the light of day after this harrowing ordeal, and the book was originally published in 2004. Twenty years later, Microcosm is proud to release this revised and updated edition, featuring a new foreword from Extinction Rebellion co-founder Tamsin Osmond. Burning Rage remains a valuable and illuminating insider account of the ongoing battle between radical environmentalist movements and the powers of the state; one that offers frank insight into the great personal cost of political action, but also the urgency of collective resistance to capitalist violence.

Read on for an excerpt of Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: The FBI vs. the Earth Liberation Front by Craig Rosenbraugh, now available for preorder from our site or from your local bookseller. Out everywhere 7/9/24.

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