2026 Forthcoming Poetry Books by Queer People of Color

Updated: 1/13/2026

Alice James Books

The House Has Teeth by Aldo Amparán

September 2026 | $20.95

Aldo Amparn's second poetry collection weaves the captivating oddity of language with life's sobering realities, creating a lyrical masterpiece. The speaker's haunting experiences and the language itself are vividly captured, leaving readers entranced. Queerness and borders serve as both rejections and comforts in these undeniably exquisite poems.

Reverse Requiem by Ina Cariño

April 2026 | $19.95

Whiting Award–winning poet Ina Cariño’s sophomore collection, Reverse Requiem, explores mental health and wellness, ancestry and lineage, and the enduring complexities of human connection. In a world marked by the failures of capitalism, Reverse Requiem speaks to the lonely parts within all of us—and to the love that persists within community and ourselves, despite everything.

These soulful and elegiac poems, written in Cariño’s signature saturated lines, follow a speaker shaped by both subtle and profound personal tragedies. The collection’s emotional resonance is deepened by its formal inventiveness: poems shift in length, tone, and use of white space, mirroring the fractured, nonlinear journey at the book’s heart. The title, Reverse Requiem, suggests a retracing of a life: rather than unfolding chronologically, the poems are guided by the speaker’s shifting mental and emotional states. Early pieces carry a stark, dirge-like weight that gradually gives way to glimmers of hope—proposing that healing, though never linear, remains within reach. 

Cariño wrote Reverse Requiem gradually, over the course of a year spent immersed in other creative disciplines, including music and visual art. A mentor once told them, “Even if you stop writing, you're never truly leaving it behind—you’re always a writer if you stay open to the world.” That openness permeates this collection. Where Feast, Cariño’s debut, turned inward, Reverse Requiem reaches outward. While it remains grounded in introspection, this second book reflects a year of emotional risk and connection—extending itself toward the world and those who inhabit it.

Amistad

Stages by Tramaine Suubi

January 27, 2026 | $19.99

In this breathtaking companion poetry collection, inspired by the evolution of our brightest star, Tramaine Suubi offers poems alluding to the history of how it came to be and its effects on each human life. Readers will discover poems exploring everything from the gimmicks of capitalism to the false promises of tranquility.

This is another brilliant collection that will only reinforce Suubi as a rising star of her generation.

Autumn House Press

Les Portes by Meredith Nnoka

April 28, 2026 | $17.95

Les Portes traces how harm against women and femmes takes root, recurs, and reshapes itself across generations.

Unfolding in three movements—Le Début, Le Passé, and Le Présent—all of which rupture conventional domestic abuse narratives, and drawing heavily from zuihitsu, ekphrasis, erasure, and found forms to mirror the fractured experience of living through and after harm, these poems serve as radical meditations on the power to reflect as resistance. A queer woman caught in an abusive marriage begins to reimagine justice not as punishment but as something restorative, collective, and deeply non-carceral.

In her debut book, Nnoka poses the question that propels the collection: “Where is the path forward / that ensures no recurrence?” Rather than gesture toward resolution, Les Portes dwells inside this question, and what emerges is not consolation but an immense reckoning.

BOA Editions

This Elegance | Derrick Austin

May 5, 2026 | $19

Interweaving the sacred and the erotic, This Elegance engages with visual arts through the concept of sacra conversazione (“sacred conversation”), a style of Renaissance painting that imagines divine communion across time and space. Here, artists, thinkers, and pop icons commune in a similar sacred dialogue—Kathleen Collins, André Leon Talley, Richmond Barthé, Lyle Ashton Harris, Juan de Pareja, Janelle Monáe, Symone, and others appear as guiding spirits and creative kin.

For a Black, queer person so often dislocated from time and place, pleasure becomes an act of resistance—a grounding in the now. This Elegance is a love song—an offering to Black artistry, a tribute to visionary lives, and a testament to the power of beauty in even our most precarious moments.

Blood on the Leaves by Hope Wabuke

Fall 2026

Hope Wabuke is Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English. She is the author of the chapbooks Movement No.1: Trains, The Leaving, and her, as well as the full-length collection The Body Family. Her second full-length collection, Blood on the Leaves, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2026. Her creative and critical work has been published in numerous places such as Guernica, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salamander Literary Journal and elsewhere; she is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers and others. 

Coffee House

Our Hours are Married to Shadow by Nghiem Tran

December 8, 2026

Nghiem Tran was born in Vietnam and raised in Kansas. A Kundiman Fellow, he received his MFA from Syracuse University and is currently a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz. His first book of fiction, We’re Safe When We’re Alone, was a 2023 NPR's “Books We Love” selection. His poetry collection, Our Hours Are Married To Shadow, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.

Dopamine Books

SOULMATE AS A VERB by Kelsey L. Smoot

February 24, 2026 | $16.95

The simple yet fraught experience of embodiment lies at the thrumming heart of Kelsey L. Smoot’s SOULMATE AS A VERB. Bodies make love possible, they enable tender connection and transmit electric joy, all while leaving one vulnerable to discord and abuse, heartbreak and grief. Like a body, Smoot’s daring poetry metabolizes cruelty, seeking the tender knowledge and kinships that allow for buoyant survival. The subjectivity of a Black, trans self becomes a prism, shining a variegated intellect on everything from suburbia to Palestine, top surgery to police violence. By utilizing forms such as kwansaba, calligram, Craigslist personals, and golden shovels, SOULMATE AS A VERB revels in structures that locate poet and poem in a lineage of innovative and contemporary Black, queer verse. Kelsey L. Smoot dazzles.

Duke University Press

unrest in the nebulae by Gitan Djeli

March 24, 2026 | $19.95

In unrest in the nebulae, Gitan Djeli wields prose poetry to archive five hundred years of exploitative colonization, ecocide, extinction, militarization and deportation, slavery, indenture, negotiated nationhood, postcolonial plantation structures, and apologist histories. Writing in a queer anticolonial poetics, and using lines of Kreol, Gitan Djeli mines the tension that emerges between colonialism and language, disarticulating the myth-making aesthetics of the colonial world. She tells the story of the ‘other slavery’ in the Indian Ocean and its histories of enslavement and indenture through a subversive, fragmented poetics, and often from the perspective its geologic witnesses—a misnamed ocean or the range of mountains within it or the volcanic idea of islands. In a charge of resistance to the catastrophe of modernity, unrest in the nebulae takes seriously Sylvia Wynter’s invitation to engage “a new science of the word.”

FSG

In the Blood by Carl Phillips March 17, 2026 | $18

Even in his first book of poems, the deep contradictions in Carl Phillips’s work are already pronounced. Here is a subtle poet, attuned to the simple honesty of everyday speech, and yet steeped in classical allusion. Life here is quiet, yet burning with anger and unavoidable desire. Offering intimate statements of passion and yet retaining a private withholding, these poems take as their primary subject the body—growing, aging, loving—and spirit that fills the flesh.

When In the Blood was selected for the 1992 Morse Poetry Prize, Carl Phillips was a high-school Latin teacher. Thirty years later, he has written seventeen books of poetry, has received the Pulitzer Prize, and is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary poetry.

Graywolf Press

Party Line by Kyle Carrero Lopez

July 7, 2026 | $17

House of Anasni

Pitiful by Brandi Bird

April 7, 2026 | $17

Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection detail the author’s ongoing struggles with eating disorders and depression, conditions that disproportionately afflict Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirited persons. These challenging poems investigate the relationship between sexuality and eating disorders as well as how the voyeurism of religion (the idea of being eternally watched) intersects with both of those spheres. They also raise questions about body shaming and body sovereignty—a failed sovereignty in this case, as "sovereignty" itself is a communal concept. In the tradition of poets like Amy Berkowitz (Tender Points) and Hannah Green (Xanax Cowboy), the poems in Pitiful also lay bare the way patriarchy, medical sexism, and bigotry have not only sabotaged the treatment of such conditions but often make them worse.

Milkweed Editions

Horses by Jake Skeets

March 24, 2026 | $18

Penguin

Lift Every Voice by Phillip B. Williams July 14, 2026 | $20

From award-winning poet and novelist Phillip B. Williams, an astonishing new collection that revels in the possibility of creating one’s own light

Captivating for both its grandeur and intimacy, Lift Every Voice explores the capacity for the past to be both a source of dread and empowerment, an unshakable reminder of violence and an indelible testament to the endurance of love. In virtuosic poems that are wise, musical, richly layered, and saturated with vivid imagery, Williams honors a mother “who knew seven ways to say bitch under her breath,” a grandma whose smile “reflects the world,” and wonders at “the impossible lift” of forgiveness. Lift Every Voice is a staggering tribute to personal and collective evolutions, a vital chorus that answers only to God, community, and the empowered self.

Persea

Don't Let It Kill You by Theo LeGro June 2, 2026 | $19

Winner of the 2024 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Theo LeGro's unflinching debut explores chronic illness, inherited grief, and the brutal, tender intimacy between the body and self.

From hospital rooms to dive bars, Don't Let It Kill You by Theo LeGro confronts the complexities of loss and mortality with ferocity and wit. These poems test the tension between survival and surrender, healing and destruction, where the body is a site of betrayal and forgiveness, pain and longing, where the frailties of the flesh lead to a haunting tenderness toward the self. With language that refuses to flinch or flatter, these poems tells the truth about sickness: How boring it is. How brutal. How sacred. The poems do not seek to inspire. They do not resolve. They testify. Aching and defiant, Don't Let It Kill You refuses to yield or comply, weaving between intergenerational trauma and incurable illness with biting lyricism to explore where desire and fear collide as proof of life and life is its own feral, sacred kind of rebellion.

Sundress Publications

[sp]RED by Jessica Doe

October 2026

Jessica Doe, PhD is an Aniyunwiya inter/multi/anti-disciplinary writer, artist, and scholar. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, but born on the northwest region of Turtle Island (fka Oregon in the United States), space, place, Indigenization, and decolonization are driving forces in her work, which has been described as avant-garde conceptualism and includes several books and exhibitions.

Jessica’s doctoral research focused on the intersection of female poetry and eating disorders with an emphasis on Sylvia Plath. Her monograph expands this research to encompass modern/contemporary Indigenous and Indigiqueer poetry. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Bengaluru, India, she implemented the first credit-based generative poetry workshop for doctoral candidates at her host university site.

During her time as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, she completed an erasure poetry project using university archives as primary documents. Currently, Jessica is working on an Indigenous short horror collection. Jessica lives on NDN land with her family, which includes an ever-growing menagerie of spoilt ᏪᏌ.

Burns by SG Huerta

January 20, 2026 | $17.95

SG Huerta is a queer Xicanx writer and organizer. They are the Poetry Editor of Abode Press, a Roots.Wounds.Words. Fellow, and Tin House alum. SG is the author of two poetry chapbooks and the nonfiction chapbook GOOD GRIEF (fifth wheel press 2025). Their work has appeared in Honey Literary, The Offing, Infrarrealista Review, and elsewhere. Find them at sghuertawriting.com, or in Tejas with their partner and cats, working towards liberation for oppressed peoples everywhere. They believe Palestine will be free from the river to the sea. They encourage you to find tangible ways to support Palestinian liberation.

In poems that capture the complexity of life as a transitioning Xicanx in a tumultuous Texas climate, SG Huerta’s Burns balances the intrinsically human need for connection with the struggle to love oneself. Vivid images of half-empty bottles of testosterone gel and charred vegan grilled cheese form the backdrop for explorations of identity, orientation, grief, and an absent father across the full landscape of what it means to live. Embedded in a complicated family and pressures of assimilation, Huerta straddles liminal spaces with these poems: “I want to write / a queer poem without his ghost / reading it over my shoulder.” Through sonnets, stream-of-consciousness, and lyrical narratives, Burns balances internal conflict and societal expectation. Anyone who has overshared with a cashier out of longing for a flash of acknowledgment across another’s face will know the unresolved grief, love, and limitless self-discovery smoldering throughout Burns.

Hound Triptych by Dani Janae

March 3, 2026 | $17.95

Hound Triptych, Dani Janae's debut collection of poetry, is a raw exploration of the intricacies of being an adoptee, the accompanying grief, and the destruction and rebuilding of the self through girlhood and into womanhood. The collection is a candid journey through the emotional landscape of abandonment and the human need for belonging; this is poetry that reaches into your chest and tells your heart, Listen. Feel. The poems mix gritty darkness with captivating imagery-the continuity of the ouroboros, cyclical and ruinous, the mouth devouring its own body; hair as a living entity, its knots growing into mammals that speak; a daughter's quiet, intrinsic love for her mother, "prized in the marrow, rich and pearlescent." Coupled with a wider scrutiny of the capitalization of adoption, Janae provides a perspective both personal and wide. Hound Triptych is an experience in the richness of the lyrical and an invitation to gaze into the unfettered chaos of the psyche and the heart and sit with them, unflinching.

Tin House

Staying Still by Hieu Minh Nguyen

September 1, 2026 | $18

Stegner and NEA Fellow Hieu Minh Nguyen’s visionary poetry collection about generational loneliness, desire, and longing

The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection Not Here, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Staying Still centers on the question of how: How do our anxieties around the idea of belonging estrange us from the very world we seek to belong in? How impossible does it feel to stay still and face ourselves? From the intimate longing of queer boyhood to the collective expectations imposed upon children of refugees, these poems face head-on the rejections, grief, and violence we fear in fractured family dynamics, love, and desire as we search for our place in this world.

University of Chicago Press

The Intimacy Trials by Aja Couchois Duncan

March 2026 | $18

A post-apocalyptic Native poetry collection that creates possibility for repair and reconciliation by holding the simultaneity of a violent past and a hopeful future.

Aja Couchois Duncan’s third book of poetry, The Intimacy Trials, explores cycles of violence, loss, and love that arc across history. Composed of intersecting narratives, this collection follows a post-apocalyptic collective of survivors living in a state of gratitude, shame, and awe amid desecrated ecosystems. The present tense of The Intimacy Trials carries the magnitude of a historic past tense filled with land theft, genocide, settler colonialism, and the vicissitudes of romantic love. Couchois Duncan’s lyrical, concomitant stories produce a space that holds in balance the complexities of life—joy, despair, intimacy, and irreconcilable grief.

In language that is prophetic, lush, and unequivocal, The Intimacy Trials is a loving accountability letter to our past, present, and future selves, holding both our yearning for connection and the remembrance of what has driven us apart.

University of Pittsburgh Press

Antediluvian by Kameryn Alexa Carter

February 24, 2026 | $20

Antediluvian engages with themes of the ecstatic, desire, mental illness, and spirituality. Written in part during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book’s speaker calls on an intertextual constellation of artists as they attempt to wade through agoraphobia, parse out their relationship with God, and navigate falling in love. Overall, the landscape of the collection is a deep dive into the speaker’s psyche, and what it means to push past the confines of one’s oppressive interior.

Writ Large Projects

My God's Been Silent by Darius Phelps

February 13, 2026 | $20

My God's Been Silent is a poetry collection that lives at the intersection of faith and fury, grief and grace. Written in the aftermath of loss and disillusionment, these poems are elegies and incantations-each one a plea, a protest, a prayer left unanswered. This collection excavates the silence of God through the body of a Black man who has known both sanctuary and abandonment, who has tried to make sense of suffering in a world that too often turns its back This is a book for those who have screamed into the void, for those who carry loss like scripture, and for anyone who has ever felt betrayed by the very thing they were taught to believe would save them. With language that sears and softens, My God's Been Silent does not seek resolution-it seeks release. This collection is not an answer. It is a reckoning. A remembering. A return.