Full-length and chapbooks are included in this list. Last updated: 5/27/2022
Acre Books
In Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking by C.T. Salazar (February, $16), the speaker is situated in the tradition of Southern literature but reimagines its terrain with an eye on the South’s historic and ongoing violence. His restless relationship with religion (“a child told me there was a god / and because he was smiling, I believed him”) eventually includes a reclamation of the language of belief in the name of desire. “I felt myself become gospel in your hands,” the speaker tells his beloved. And, as the title poem asserts, a headless body “leaves more room for salvation.”
Alan Squire Publishing
let the dead in by Saida Agostini (March 26, $15.99), is an exploration of the mythologies that seek to subjugate Black bodies, and the counter-stories that reject such subjugation. Audacious, sensual, and grieving, this work explores how Black women harness the fantastic to craft their own road to freedom. A journey across Guyana, London, and the United States, it is a meditation on black womanhood, queerness, the legacy of colonization, and pleasure. These poems craft a creation story fat with love, queerness, mermaids, and blackness.
Alice James Books
Brother Sleep by Aldo Amparán (September, $17.95). About Amparán's book, sam sax said, "This book is a beautiful haunting. Formally inventive and alive, Aldo Amparán’s first collection Brother Sleep is essential reading for anyone who’s ever made it through night. The poems again and again seek definition for what can never be defined, living in the liminal space between the poet and memory. Amparán gifts us with a clear and important voice in this queer reckoning with landscape, desire, illness, and touch.”
Song of my Softening by Omotara James (August, $18.95). About James' book, Jericho Brown said, "Omotora James is a poet of the body, and Song of My Softening moves us emotionally as it reminds us of our physical and sensual selves. These poems beg to be spoken aloud as one sister might to another, or as one sister might to an audience of sisters. These are daring poems from a poet brave enough to take the kind of risks that lead to beauty: ‘Your fat spills soft across the moonlit crown of grass./Your soulmates are a gaggle of fish, shoaling thick,/until you are schooled enough in this love.’”
Arsenal Pulp Press
Beast at Every Threshold by Natalie Wee (March, $17.95 CA / $14.95 US) dances between familial hauntings and cultural histories, intimate hungers and broader griefs. Memories become malleable, pop culture provides a backdrop to glittery queer love, and folklore speaks back as a radical tool of survival. With unapologetic precision, Natalie Wee unravels constructs of “otherness” and names language our most familiar weapon, illuminating the intersections of queerness, diaspora, and loss with obsessive, inexhaustible ferocity—and in resurrecting the self rendered a site of violence, makes visible the "Beast at Every Threshold." Beguiling and deeply imagined, Wee’s poems explore thresholds of marginality, queerness, immigration, nationhood, and reinvention of the self through myth.
Auckland University Press
Super Model Minority by Chris Tse (March 10, $24.99). Chris Tse was born and raised in Lower Hutt. He studied English literature and film at Victoria University of Wellington, where he also completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. Tse was one of three poets featured in AUP New Poets 4 (Auckland University Press, 2011) and his work has appeared in publications in New Zealand and overseas. His first collection, How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (Auckland University Press, 2014) won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry in 2016.
BOA Editions
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen (September 13, $17). What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue?
In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Always at work in the wrecked heart of this new collection is a switchboard operator, picking up and connecting calls. Raucous 2 a.m. prank calls. Whispered-in-a-classroom emergency calls. And sometimes, its pages record the dropping of a call, a failure or refusal to pick up. With irrepressible humor and play, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness. Hybrid in form and set in New England, West Texas, and a landlocked province of China, among other places, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency refuses neat categorizations and pat answers. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold onto one another.
A Shiver in the Leaves by Luther Hughes (September 27, $17). Nestled against the backdrop of Seattle's flora, fauna, and cityscape, Luther Hughes' debut poetry collection wrestles with the interior and exterior symbiosis of a gay Black man finding refuge from the threat of depression and death through love and desire. Hughes draws readers into a Seattle that is heavily entrenched in violent anti-Blackness, and full of vulnerable and personal encounters from both the speaker’s past and present. With reverent and careful imagery, Hughes fashions deeply saturated, tender vignettes that reckon relationships between family and friends, lovers, nature, and the police-state. A Shiver in the Leaves is stunningly cinematic in its layered portrayal of the never-ending dualities of a queer Black poet’s life in the city. Hughes's interrogation of selfhood renders a sharply intimate and viscerally powerful reimagining of what it means to be alive in a body, and what it can mean to live.
Burning Eye Books
The Body in its Seasons by Maz Hedgehog (April, £9.99). About Hedgehog's book, afshan d’souza-lodhi writes, "Maz writes poems that pull you in and caress you before making you question your entire understanding of the world. This collection takes what we know of poetry, ourselves and each other and pushes all those boundaries to create beautiful moments we can escape into. I am envious I didn’t write these poems."
Kinsey Scale for the Emotionally Fragile by Bibi June (May, price £6.99). The Kinsey Scale is an archaic measure of homosexuality on a scale of 0-6, thought up by Dr. Alfred Kinsey in 1948. But the world is ending, and modern queers are famously bad at numbers. ‘Kinsey Scale for the Emotionally Fragile Queer’ is a rewrite of the original scale, measured to fit the expansiveness of a generation of queers who have lived from apocalypse to apocalypse. In this Kinsey Scale, our lives are not represented by rigid numbers, but by poetry on queer love, rituals, protest, friendships, and our ability to adapt to a changing world.
Copper Canyon Press
Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi (April 5, $16). In their bold debut poetry collection, Akwaeke Emezi—award-winning author of Freshwater, PET, The Death of Vivek Oji, and Dear Senthuran—imagines a new depth of belonging. Crafted of both divine and earthly materials, these poems travel from home to homesickness, tracing desire to surrender and abuse to survival, while mapping out a chosen family that includes the son of god, mary auntie, and magdalene with the chestnut eyes. Written from a spiritfirst perspective and celebrating the essence of self that is impossible to drown, kill, or reduce, Content Warning: Everything distills the radiant power and epic grief of a mischievous and wanting young deity, embodied.
Diode Editions
Mouth, Sugar, Smoke by Eric Tran (July, $18). Eric Tran is the author of Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke (Diode Editions, Spring 2022) and The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer (Autumn House Press, 2020) as well as the chapbooks Revisions (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018) and Affairs with Men in Suits (Backbone Press, 2014) . He is an Associate Editor for Orison Books.
He is a resident physician in psychiatry at the Mountain Area Health Education Center, graduated from the UNC School of Medicine, and holds an MFA from UNC Wilmington.
Eggtooth Editions
Longing and Other Heirlooms by sagaree jain and Arati Warrier (Fall, price TBD). Sagaree Jain (they/them) is a poet, writer, artist, and queer from the Silicon Valley. Their writing has been featured in Autostraddle, The Margins, them. magazine, and The Offing, where they’re also an Assistant Editor. They are class and caste privileged. Sagaree lives in Oakland and tweets at @sagareejain.
Arati Warrier (she/they) is a queer South Asian American poet from Austin, TX, currently living in the Bay Area. She featured on the final stage at Women of the World Poetry Slam 2014, is a recipient of the Andrew Julius Gutow Academy of American Poets prize, and is a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion. You can find their work in Junoesq Literary Magazine, The Aerogram, and BOAAT press. Arati’s other interests include dancing, reading, and loving intentionally. She is a part time vegetable enthusiast and a full time youth and community worker.
Finishing Line Press
Sandalwood-Scented Skeletons by Rhea Dhanbhoora (January 28, $14.99). When you enter Rhea Dhanbhoora‘s artfully composed universe of these twenty poems, you will find received forms like the pantoum, those in nonce forms, excellent prose poems, and one of my favorite sestinas of this century. You will know that you are experiencing a new master of observation, investigation, and mystery in her poetry. She knows when to be tender with an edge:
Silk scarf stinking of sandalwood
swaying pretty to
hide the smile on my odd face.
and when to be political:
it is not a country I have left behind, but a colony on the brink of extinction.
Flower Song Press
Burnt Spoon Burnt Honey by Anthony Aguero (May, price $18). Anthony Aguero is a queer writer in Los Angeles, California. His work has appeared, or will appear, in the Bangalore Review, 2River View, The Acentos Review, The Temz Review, Rhino Poetry, Cathexis Northwest Press, 14 Poems, Redivider Journal, and others.
Foglifter Press
fist of wind by Nefertiti Asanti (date TBD, $12) is a lyrical testimony that centers the Black body as a site of healing and transformation. This chapbook/collection of poetry explores the lived experience of menstruation marked by pain and the liminal existence of Black folk as magical and mortal. fist of wind draws from magical realism to ask: If pain is information, what does individual and collective Black pain tell us about our world and about ourselves? How do we embody healing in this lifetime and beyond?
FSG Books
Then the War and Selected Poems by Carl Phillips (February 1, $35). Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an “ongoing quest;” Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attending violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther one goes, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started. Ultimately, Phillips resists easy pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as a profound force for revolution, conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.
Game Over Books
Already Knew You Were Coming by Sarah Nwafor (January 25, $15). Sarah Nnenna Loveth Nwafor (They/Them) is a queer Igbo-American Poet, Educator, and Facilitator who descends of a powerful ancestry. They believe that storytelling is magick, and they speak to practice traditions of Igbo orature. When they witness, their forebears are pleased. Sarah has been writing for a minute and is learning something new about their voice each year, but one thing they’re proud to share is that they have a chapbook forthcoming with Game Over Books! When Sarah's not writing; they’re probably sitting under a tree, reading about Love, dancing with friends or cooking a bomb-ass meal like the true Taurus they are. They can be found on instagram (@sarahnwafor) or on their website: sarahnwafor.com
Revival by Yena Sharma Purmasir (date and price TBD). Yena Sharma Purmasir is a poet and essayist from New York City. She was the Queens Teen Poet Laureate from 2010-2011. She is the author of Until I Learned What It Meant (Where Are You Press, 2013) and When I'm Not There (self-published, 2016), as well as co-author of [Dis]Connected Volume 1: Poems & Stories of Connection and Otherwise (Central Avenue Publishing, 2018). A Best of Net nominee, her work has also appeared in Mask Magazine, the Rising Phoenix Review, and Thought Catalog. Purmasir earned a master's degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, where she focused on South Asian religious traditions. She resides in Boston.
Glass Poetry
our gods are hungry for elegies by Honora Ankong (date and price TBD). Honora Ankong is a Cameroonian-American poet. She was born in Buea, Cameroon, and moved to the United States with her family at the age of thirteen. She received her undergraduate degree in English with a minor in African American and African Diaspora Studies from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She splits her time between North Carolina and Virginia, as she is currently a Virginia Tech MFA in poetry candidate. Her works exist to complicate and expand narratives of Blackness, immigaration, displacement, queer identity, &. Her words can be found at Lolwe, Mineral Lit, Glass, The Maine Review, storySouth, and elsewhere. She has work forthcoming at Foglifter and The Notre Dame Review. She is a 2020 Pushcart prize nominee and has been featured by Poetry Daily.
Graywolf Press
Against Heaven by Kemi Alabi (April 5, $16) is a praise song made for the flames of a burning empire—a freedom dream that shapeshifts into boundless multiplicities for the wounds made in the name of White supremacy and its gods. Alabi has written an astonishing collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit’s capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing—the highest power there is.
Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor (November, price TBD). Courtney Faye Taylor is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of Concentrate (Graywolf Press, 2022), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Courtney earned her B.A from Agnes Scott College and her MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where she received the Hopwood Prize in Poetry. She is the winner of the 92Y Discovery / Boston Review Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing is featured in The Nation, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2020, Poetry Magazine, The New Republic, Kenyon Review and elsewhere. Courtney is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Charlotte Street Foundation and the Mae Fellowship. She works as a content writer and social media manager in Kansas City, MO.
Haymarket Books
All the Blood Involved in Love by Maya Marshall (June 28, $17). Maya Marshall is an editor and a poet. She is co-founder of underbellymag.com, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Marshall has earned fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, Cave Canem, the Community of Writers, and The Watering Hole. She has served as a senior editor for [PANK] and works as a manuscript editor for Haymarket Books. Her poems have appeared in RHINO, Potomac Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. While at MacDowell, Marshall worked on a crown of sonnets considering queer and familial love. Marshall’s poems have recently been selected for Best New Poets 2019 and have received a Pushcart nomination.
Super Sad Black Girl by Diamond Sharp (October 4, $17). Diamond Sharp is a poet and essayist from Chicago. She has performed at Chicago's Stage 773 and her work has been featured on Chicago Public Radio. She has been published in the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Vice, Pitchfork, Lenny, PANK, and others. A Callaloo fellow, she has also attended the Wright/Hurston workshop and is a member of the inaugural Poetry Foundation Incubator class. Her debut book of poetry, Super Sad Black Girl, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books. Diamond is an alumna of Wellesley College.
House of Anansi
My Grief, the Sun by Sanna Wani (April 5, CAD $19.95). Sanna Wani is a Kashmiri settler living near the Missinnihe river (Eastern Ojibwa: trusting waters), on land stewarded since time immemorial by the Mississauga of the New Credit, the Anishnaabeg, the Chippewa, the Wendat, and the Haudnosaunee among many other diverse First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples. She is an MA candidate in Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She loves daisies.
Hub City Press
Thresh & Hold by Marlanda Dekine (March 29, $16) is a holy, radical unlearning and reclamation of self. What does it mean to be a Gullah-Geechee descendant from a rural place where a third of the nation’s founding wealth was harvested by trafficked West and Central Africans? Dekine’s poems travel across age and time, signaling that both the past and future exist in the present. Through erasure and persona, Dekine reimagines and calls to task the Works Progress Administration narratives, modern-day museums, and intergenerational traumas. Beyond gospel music, fear, and the stories of generations past, Thresh & Hold offers magic, healing, and innovative pathways to manifest intimacy. Dekine remembers, remakes, and brings forth their many selves, traveling far in order to deeply connect to a spiritual home within and all around them, calling: “I am listening to Spirit. I am not dying today.”
Kallisto Gaia Press
How to Identify Yourself with a Wound by KB Brookins (February 1, current sale price $10). About Brookins' work, Cyrus Cassells said, "As KB navigates burning issues of love, identity, race, and enforced gender, bearing witness to how intimacy can be a battleground, a declared truce, or an Eden, How to Identify Yourself with a Wound is never less than compelling and absorbing: ‘Let me tell you the story of a tenderness the world refused to call / beautiful but it lives. "The powerful lines, the no-holds-barred voice, and risk-taking candor of these dynamic debut poems make the reader hungry for a whole volume.'"
Kent State University
Sister Tongue by Farnaz Fatemi (September, $17) explores negative spaces—the distance between twin sisters, between lovers, between Farsi and English, between the poet’s upbringing in California and her family in Iran. This space between vibrates with loss and longing, arcing with tension. Farnaz Fatemi’s poetry delves into the intricacies of the relational space between people, the depth of ancestral roots, and the visceral memories that shimmer beyond the reach of words.
Milkweed Editions
Return Flight by Jennifer Huang (January 18, $16). When Return Flight asks “what name / do you crown yourself,” Jennifer Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains—a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self—and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.” Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold. Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” the poems travel through generations—among Taiwan, China, and America—cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather’s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child’s bowl, a slap felt decades later—the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past. Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean “purple” and “blue” as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by “[keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.”
Nightboat Books
MissSettl by Kamden Hilliard (June 14, $16.95) is a funny, joyful, and spiteful collection of seriously playful poems; they carry on with provocation, engagement, and mourning for what has been done to our living practices. These poems lampoon rigged games of common sense, syntax, and citizenship to expose the mechanics of what Americans have become and what they might be freed into after the end of capitalism, and gender, and race, and money, and property. MissSettl confronts what’s in the way of love; it disrupts what limits our potential.
Madness by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué (March, $17.95) is the selected poems of a fictional poet, Luis Montes-Torres, a gay Cuban exile who makes a name for himself in the world of poetry before the contours of his ordinary life become overwhelming, stilted, and impossible. The poems and biographical commentary reveal the unpredictable wavering between anxiety and attachment, between the political and the personal, that accompanies any American life marked by difference. Madness is a study in how pleasure, crisis, wonder, disappointment, love, and fantasy are written into our forms for living.
Noemi Press
Gorgoneion by Casey Rocheteau (date and price TBD). Casey Rocheteau was born on Cape Cod, and raised as a sea witch. They are an author & visual/sound artist living in Detroit, Michigan. In 2014, Rocheteau created the Shrine of the Black Medusa Tarot. Their second poetry collection, The Dozen, was released on Sibling Rivalry Press in 2016. Winner of inaugural Write A House permanent residency in 2014, Rocheteau resides in a home they won with poems. They are a Callaloo Writer’s Workshop, Cave Canem, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference fellow. They currently serve as the Communications Manager of the Detroit Justice Center. Rocheteau often works with primary documentation and collage in what they call a haintological practice. This fixation upon specters of the past haunting the present//living impact upon the future informs their work across genres. Their writing has appeared in Apogee, The American Academy of Poets, Day One, The Offing, LitHub, Barnes and Noble Review among others. You can find them trying out material for their late stage pivot to comedy on Twitter here: @caseyrocheteau.
Nomadic Press
In Between Places by Lauren L. Wheeler (date and price TBD). Lauren Wheeler writes poetry, really short fiction, and what happens when they rub up against each other. A recovering slam poet, she twice competed at the National Poetry Slam and has featured at Cornell University, where she studied English Literature, as well as in Los Angeles, Miami, and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Lauren curated and hosted two poetry series in Ithaca, Tongue & Groove at Stella’s Wine and Whiskey Bar and Re-Verse at the Oak Café, and was a core organizer of the ForWord Girls poetry and spoken word festival in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Other Magazine, 365tomorrows, Lodestar Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, PANK Magazine, and The Nervous Breakdown.
One World
Dream of the Divided Field by Yanyi (March 1, $16). The poems in Yanyi’s latest book suggest that we enter and exit our old selves like homes. We look through the windows and recognize some former aspect of our lives that is both ours and not ours. We long for what we had even as we recognize that we can no longer live there. Yanyi conjures the beloved both within and without us: the beloved we believe we know, the beloved who is never the person we imagine, and the beloved who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them. How can we carry our homes with us? Informed by Yanyi’s experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, Dream of the Divided Field explores the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. In tender, serene, and ethereal poems, Dream of the Divided Field examines a body breaking down and a body that rebuilds in limitless and boundary-shifting ways. These are homes in memory—homes of love and isolation, lust and alienation, tenderness and violence, suffering and wonder.
PANK Books
violent wave by Natasha Mijares (December 15, price TBD). Natasha Mijares is an artist, writer, curator, and educator. Her debut collection of poetry, violent wave, is forthcoming from PANK Books. She received her MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at various international and national galleries. Her work has appeared in Gravity of the Thing, Hypertext Review, Calamity, Vinyl Poetry, and more.
Muscle Memory by Kyle Carrero Lopez (January, $12) covers money & work, Blackness & anti-blackness, the art world, queerness, & violence—governmental to interpersonal—as it swerves through its colorful landscape. Lopez interrogates the various complications of earthly living in a sharp, fresh voice, returning again & again to the musical core of his poetics. Afro-Cuban drumming & disco & Solange commune as these poems ping-pong between reverent softness and unsparing critique. Equal parts jovial and furious, this is a debut with teeth.
Penguin Poetry
All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran (February 15, $18) investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.
Penguin Random House
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong (April 5, $24). In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
Perennial Press
Light Spun by Kwame Daniels (August 15, price TBD). carries the reader on the poet's journey toward xirself. At once a meditation on love - outward and inward - this book is a collection of poems over a three-year period, wherein the poet details xir experiences with love, mental health, and Black American spirituality
Plan B Press
apocalypse blues by Raya Tuffaha (January, price TBD).
Platypus Press
Drowning in Light by Taylor Steele (march, $18). Her love for words has led to her poetry being published in Apogee Journal, HEArt Journal, BOAAT Press, and more. Her chapbook “Dirty.Mouth.Kiss” is available on Pizza Pi Press, and her newest collection “Drowning in Light” is forthcoming at Platypus Press. She is an internationally ranked spoken word artist who has been featured on Huffington Post, Brooklyn Poets, Button Poetry and is a 2016 Pushcart Nominee. Taylor is currently a Staff Writer at BuzzFeed. Taylor was awarded a residency at The Center at West Park, where she wrote and directed a new play in October 2019. She currently writes with CNT Productions, a production company championing marginalized voices off and on screen. She is also the founder of the theater initiative Burrowing Artists, a project that pairs not-yet-emerging playwrights and actors and asks them to co-create a monologue. She is currently acting as script consultant on the multimedia theater project Is this love, or is it fantasy? created by musical artists Delune. Taylor graduated with honors from The New School with a degree in Culture & Media. During her time there, she worked as Writer’s Assistant to Janine Ditullio and studied under Laurie Collyer and Caveh Zahedi. She also served as a dramaturge for La MaMa’s Resident Director, Zishan Ugurlu, on the 2014 production of “Marathon Dancing: Letters to Wall Street in the Era of Wonderful Nonsense.” Taylor is a triple-Taurus who believes in the power of art to change, shape, and heal.
Porosity Press
BLK WTTGNSN by Mohammed Zenia (date and price TBD). Mohammed Zenia is a Sudanese/Eritrean poet, working through the mediums of text, visual symbols and sound to explore issues of language and the ever-changing meaning of words, identity and place, gender, sexuality and love, through a black diasporic lens. Mohammed is the author of the chapbook Barroom Seance published by Rockwell Press in 2013, An Astrex is a Mixtape published by Rly Srs Lit in 2018, and along with video artist Jonathan Rafael, co-founded Nada: the Dadaist Magazine About Nothing. Mohammed was born in Sofia Bulgaria in 1988, and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Really Serious Literature
What the Water Gave Me by V. Ruiz (date and price TBD). V. Ruiz is a Queer Xicana bruja, writer, and artist living in Las Vegas, Nevada. Their debut is In Stories We Thunder (Sundress Publications, 2022).
Red Hen Press
gossypiin by Ra Malkia Imhotep (April 12, $16.95). This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories, secrets and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined and remixed, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival and self-possession. In this way, Ra Malika Imhotep invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity.
Selcouth Station
The Sunflower Faces East at Dawn by Thokozani Mbwana (date and price TBD). In an attempt to flee the current reality, Thokozani created Written By Flora. Lovingly named after the Original Gangsta- and the Giver of their Second Name- Ambuya (Grandma) Flora- Written By Flora is a place where healing takes many forms and comes to play, often. Thokozani describes themself as an Ancestor- summoning Poet, Creative Guide and Community Healer with an unhealthy obsession with pizza.
Seven Kitchens Press
Girl 2.0 by Nora Hikari (March 14, $9). Nora Hikari is an Asian-American trans woman currently residing in Philadelphia. Her work explores the internal universes of young trans women coming into adulthood in the modern age, and has been selected to be featured in such journals as Gulf Coast, ANMLY, The Shade Journal, and Palette Poetry. Her chapbook, Girl 2.0, was a winner of the Robin Becker Series, and is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press in 2022.
Sundress Publishing
Year of the Unicorn Kidz by Jason B. Crawford (March 15, $12.99). Jason B. Crawford is a black, nonbinary, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as SplitLip Magazine, Voicemail Poems, Glass Poetry, and Kissing Dynamite, they are the Chief Editor for The Knight’s Library. Crawford has their Bachelors of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. Their debut chapbook collection Summertime Fine is out through Variant Lit. Their second chapbook Twerkable Moments is due from Paper Nautilus Press in 2021.
for the joy of it by anaïs peterson (date and price TBD). anaïs peterson is a queer, mixed race asian american prose poet, lyric essayist, and organizer focused on fossil fuel extraction and the petrochemical buildout in appalachia. anaïs is currently occupying osage territory (pittsburgh pa) where they graduated from the university of pittsburgh in 2020 with a ba in urban studies and english writing. anaïs' writing explores themes of incarceration and abolition, community care, gender and queerness, and imagining the possibilities of liberation. anaïs is currently working as the digital content coordinator for off menu press and a poetry reader for non.plus lit. anaïs is also currently the petrochemicals and infrastructure organizer with earthworks where they are working to slow and stop the building of petrochemical and crude oil infrastructure in the permian and louisiana. anaïs writes in black pen and garamond size 11. you can find a list of their publications under the publication tab.
In Stories We Thunder by V. Ruiz (date and price TBD). V. Ruiz is a Queer Xicana bruja, writer, and artist living in Las Vegas, Nevada. Their debut is In Stories We Thunder (Sundress Publications, 2022).
The Song Cave
Dereliction by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker (date and price TBD). Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a writer & literary radio experimentalist from the Great Lakes. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming from The Song Cave in 2022.
Trouble Department
BODYELECTRONIC by Aerik Francis (April, price TBD) presents the kind of poetry reading experience that leaves the brain overclocked in the best possible way. Each of the chapbook’s 18 pieces will be worth coming back to again and again to feel out their many bends and subroutines. We feel like this will probably be timely subject matter for our cultural moment, but in these times a lot can happen in six months, so who knows? At least in the case of this chapbook, the uncertainty is part of the fun.
We Are Babies
Anomalia by Cadence Chung (March, $25 NZD). Cadence is a poet, musician, and student at Wellington High School. She has been writing poetry since she was at primary school, and since then has loved writing, whether it be songs, short stories, or poems. Outside of poetry, she draws inspiration from classic literature, Tumblr text posts, and roaming antique stores.
YesYes Books
Another Way to Split Water by Alycia Pirmohamed (Fall, price TBD). Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in the UK. Currently, she is a postdoctoral Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Liverpool, where she is working with the Ledbury Poetry Critics programme. Previously, she received an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, where she studied poetry written by second-generation immigrants. In 2020, Alycia was the winner of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Alycia is the author of the chapbooks Hinge (ignitionpress), both a 2020 Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Recommendation and shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award, and Faces that Fled the Wind, selected by Camille Rankine for the 2018 BOAAT Press Chapbook Prize. In 2021, her chapbook Second Memory, a creative non-fiction piece co-authored with Pratyusha, will be co-published with Baseline Press (Canada) and Guillemot Press (UK). Alycia was the winner of the 2020 Pamet River Prize and her debut poetry collection, Another Way to Split Water is forthcoming with YesYes Books in Fall 2022. Alycia has received support from the Individual Artist Program via Calgary Arts Develoment, the Royal Society of Literature, and an Open Project Grant from Creative Scotland as co-founder of the Scottish BAME Writers Network. She is also the recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the 2019 CBC Poetry Award, the Gulf Coast Poetry Contest, the 92Y Discovery Contest, and the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Award. Her other awards can be found under News. Along with poetry, Alycia writes poetry criticism, reviews, and lyric essays. Alycia is a co-editor of They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (forthcoming, Blue Oak Press), and currently reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She also curated and edited Ceremony (Tapsalteerie, 2019), a BAME anthology of new Scottish Writing.
As She Appears by Shelley Wong (May 10, $18) Winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize, Shelley Wong’s debut, As She Appears, foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship that was marked by silence, a woman crosses over and embodies the expanse of desire and self-love. Other speakers transform the natural world and themselves, using art and beauty as a means of sanctuary and subversion. With both praise and precision, Wong considers how women inhabit and remake their environment. The ecstatic joys of Pride dances and late-night Chinatown meals, conversations with Frida Kahlo, trees that “burst into glamour,” and layers of memory permeate these poems as they travel through suburban California, perfumed fashion runways, to a Fire Island summer. Wong writes in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive in love, exactly as they are.
*All writers have agreed to be on this list. If you want to recommend someone for this list, please email Luther the author name, title, price, press (self-published is fine), drop date. If recommending someone other than yourself, please include contact information. Email Luther at luther@shadeliteraryarts.org.