Poetry Books by Trans, Nonbinary, & Genderqueer Writers for The Sealey Challenge
- Jul 30
- 17 min read
It's the 10-year anniversary of The Sealey Challenge, a reading challenge created by Nicole Sealey in 2017. Celebrate 10 years of reading with this list of 31 poetry books by *trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer writers to add to your challenge this year and even beyond. Learn more about the history of The Sealey Challenge here. Remember to use the hashtag: #SealeyChallenge.
*The use of "trans" here may also include indigiqueer, Two-Spirit, third genders, and anyone whose gender identity is nonconforming and/or different from their gender assigned at birth.
This list is in alphabetical order by last name.
August 1
Alice James Books
In poems born of intense loneliness, grief, anger, and uncertainty at a convergence of apocalypses: a raging pandemic, a worsening climate crisis, and numerous global uprisings, Ally Ang's Let the Moon Wobble asks and seeks to answer the question: What makes the end of the world worth surviving?
Let the Moon Wobble considers multiple speakers' journeys through the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the rise of fascism. With humor, lyricism, and endearing absurdity, Ang uses varied forms and poetic traditions to process feelings of helplessness and uncertainty. These poems ache for connection and lineage in a time of unrelenting isolation, plumbing the depths of grief and rage against the systems and institutions that aim to repress and kill queer people of color.
August 2
One World
Exiled from ancestral homelands, how can one find a place for themself in the world? In this stunning sophomore collection, the acclaimed poet Fatimah Asghar unweaves residual grief to reckon with their relationship to Allah, long-estranged but deeply loved kin, the landscape of their ancestors, and love itself.
In meditative poems, Daughter of the Mountains grapples with multiple facets of fulfillment, betrayal, love, loss, and longing, illustrating how place, lineage, and environment inform the practice of spirituality and vice versa. With wisps of humor, imagery that is as beautiful as it is startling, and powerfully disruptive formal invention, this is an intimately lyrical and explosive collection.
August 3
Metonymy Press
Oscillating between post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker’s communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.
The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.
August 4
Wave Books
Of Mongrelitude is a colloquy on the mongrel body, textual and actual, sexual, specieal, and racial. Composed in a hybrid style, it makes the argument that everything can and does come into ‘englyssh’: ancient and invented languages, european and indigenous, tongues not yet named. All of this ‘made up as medicine’, as ceremony for all creatures, as literal song.
August 5
Coach House Press
In Michael Chang's latest, all the world's a vaudeville stage, and this poet is its jester with a knife.
Like an elongated diss track, Chang's poems go from flirty to righteous, wrathful to lackadaisical, all in the span of one page. The titans of pop culture and poetry wrestle at Chang’s whimsy, their poems a series of flings and retorts at the end of a late-night spree.
Like a compendium of American poetics, this collection breezily changes style and mood as easily as a prom queen smiles beneath the crown. With nods to O’Hara and Ashbery, the poems in Things a Bright Boy Can Do flit from the sewage of Americana to the heights of ecstatic experience. Each poem is a playground meant to delight readers before they skip along.
August 6
Write Bloody Press
Cut to Bloom, where Noah Arhm Choi dares to explore the journey of unlearning the survival instinct of trauma. Through the complex hyphen between Asian and American identity, queerness and belonging, and survival and choice, Arhm Choi delves into the heart of what it means to redefine oneself. This book disrupts the colonialism of strict poetic form, embracing the beauty of ambiguity and challenging clear definitions. Cut to Bloom invites you on an exploration of growth, cutting away what no longer serves us to arrive at our true selves. The reader will find inspiration to redefine identity and embrace the transformative power of poetry.
August 7
Bottlecap Press
florida, i love you violent is a love letter to the communities that hold resistance and joy in the same breath – to those who understand that both love and violence are necessary components for self-acceptance, growth and empowerment. Chugani’s debut chapbook explores a complex love with the place they call home: a love that is fractured by political and social hostility, but one that finds liberation and agency through ancestral connection and chosen family.
These poems speak to and from the margins – where transgender communities organize, where immigrant communities celebrate, where history is carried and resisted in the body. Through a collage of poetic styles and voices, Chugani captures a story of Florida that defies headlines and stereotypes: one that is unapologetically queer, fiercely diverse, and deeply beautiful. They invite readers to witness the radical act of loving a place enough to call it home, even when it does not always love you back.
August 8
Tin House
Brilliant and innovative, Rob Macaisa Colgate’s debut poetry collection, Hardly Creatures, takes the form—visually and metaphorically—of an accessible art museum. Through nine sections that act as gallery rooms, the book shepherds the reader through the radiance and mess of the disability community.
At the heart of the collection is an exploration and recognition of access intimacy. Marked with universal access symbols to guide the way, poems mimic sensory rooms, tactile replicas, benches for resting, and more; “the body of a poem” itself is reimagined through formal experimentation, as abecedarians are scrambled out of order and sestinas are pressurized into new sequences. These poems also play with pop culture allusions, social media posts, and the infinite possibilities within queer love and deep friendships. With lyrical clarity and attention to language, Hardly Creatures reaches out and offers inventive, heartfelt insights for all readers, and celebrates the disability community through the lens of a visionary new voice in poetry.
August 9
remembering (y)our light, River 瑩瑩 Dandelion's debut poetry chapbook asks how we preserve intergenerational memory when the archives hold missing knowledge. In this collection, food lives as a conduit of memory, recipes hold ancestral wisdom, and poems become spells for safety. These poems honor matriarchs and elders who have lived through tumult and demonstrates how poetry can archive history. From Toisan to New York City, River's poems delve into how we cultivate care and safety within ourselves, each other, and in community. These pieces are testament to how we address and heal intergenerational wounds to remember who we and who we came here to be.
August 10
Button Poetry
(On |Un-)Becoming is a collection of stories, reflections, forgivenesses and offerings rooted in conversations and conflicts with FreeQuency’s mother, chosen family & other selves. The anti disciplinary project liberates the concept of “transitioning” from the realm of Westernized notions of gender and expands|explores|explodes the concept of (un)becoming in relationship to international Blackness, migration|movement, geographic and corporeal displacement, spiritual|mental health and the ties between personal and communal transformation.
August 11
Banshee Press
In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett gifts us visions of flight and falling. This stunningly accomplished debut deconstructs and redefines notions of Blackness, queerness, and masculinity through the lenses of myth, pop culture, and that most transcendent of sports – the high jump.
Formally inventive, these poems speak in a vulnerable, rapturous voice that urges us to reimagine our possible selves, while navigating a labyrinthine America that conjures its young into monsters. Taking us from the arroyos of New Mexico to a West Cork farm in winter, these meditations on beauty and the elusive nature of love are insightful and hard-won: the spirit triumphs, even when the body falls.
August 12
New Directions Publishing
Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is a book-length poem that follows a personal and historical narrative impelled by the violent occupation of Palestine. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions, and surveillance technology that Palestinians face, both within Palestine and across the diaspora. Searing and fierce, tender and pleading, rock flight invites the reader to embark on an exploration of space while limited by the boxed confines of the page. Through the whole, Hourani moves between poetry and prose, historical events and meditations on language, Fluxus-like instructions and interactions with friends, strangers, and family.
August 13
Nightboat Books
Telling the truth is powerful medicine. It is a fire that lights the way for others. When we speak our "Fire Power," we join a long & honored line of warriors against injustice.
Chrystos is a Menominee writer and two-spirit activist who has published various books and poems that explore indigenous Americans's civil rights, social justice, and feminism. Chrystos is also a lecturer, writing teacher and fine-artist.
August 14
Black Lawrence Press
Michal “MJ” Jones’ debut Hood Vacations is a rhythmic & quiet rumbling – an unflinching recollection of Blackness, queerness, gender, and violence through lenses of family lineage and confessional narrative. A nostalgia for an unreachable home permeates these poems: “We were mighty beautiful once, in golden dust.” The speaker of Hood Vacations tells of magic: of praying mantises, bathtub octopuses, Black ghosts, & bringing back “rainbow soap colors”. It is a book of passing – as, through, and on. Hop on in.
August 15
Alice James Books
As a young, Black, queer person in a small town in the South where everyone knows everyone, Orders of Service is a coming-of-age exploration of the everyday fever of fleeting relationships, while capturing the romantic, psychic quotidian of the Bible Belt. This commentary on gospel traditionalism is armed with dreams of helping to reshape lived realities where being your truest self could be shunned or ostracized in deeply religious communities. It ruminates on this Deep South narrative by exploring how the age of social media has created a rich underground counterculture that offsets the surface rituals of grief and shame. The poems illuminate lineages of performance and fellowship for queer descendants of the last Black folks out of the Carolina cotton fields, and features Anansi-like speakers (Anansi is a trickster spider featured in West African and Caribbean folklore) while delving into old-school sensibilities and advice. This gospel-fugue bends language in the backwoods of faith and desire. Pulling figures from the stories of childhood―Icarus, a flying boy wanting to escape; Asterion the Minotaur―the wandering son of someone absent; Medusa, a wronged person portrayed as a mankiller; Cerberus, a beastly guardian intent on being a “good” boy― these poems are punky, preachy, prissy, and pink-collar, and all help create the fever-dream that is Orders of Service.
August 16
Knopf
In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives. This staggering, irreverent, gentle, and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis’s poetics—from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the mid-century cinematic icon The Lady Chablis.
Then, brick by brick, she builds them anew and makes them her own. She maps a path onto the contradictions, precarity, and revelry of her hometown, “New Orleans / As that modern text, witnessed, and revised, by the light as radically / As by the water, which is history, which slip / Thru your hands. This city is a ghost for hire.” With this as her frame, Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace. “You see something in me,” she writes, “something grand, / Your very cowardice yearns for; you / Who would want to own it, wear it, be by it adorned, / It is so rare a thing, so fine as I am, and seemingly / Fragile, creole, and easily decadent: it is like a tree, then.”
In a world where what one is, and how one looks, or even just the idea of a person can get one killed, this is transformative work. This collection does not stump for its humanity, nor does it compromise its art in order to speak in its own voice. Sprung to its own sound, celebratory without apology, this is a book which reclaims the act of poetry itself, too, for the way it can reshape the writer, the mind, the body, the story we choose, and the images the world can imprint on us. (Can poetry do that?) Approaching from every angle and expanding in every direction as we read, Death of the First Idea probes every aspect of transformation. Celebratory, interrogatory, reclamatory, full of rage and range, these are poems for the storms of our time.
August 17
Wolsak & Wynn
In Prathna Lor’s first full-length collection we are introduced to a unique voice in Canadian poetry. Moving fluidly between prose poems and more fractured, open verse, Lor meditates on voice, on disaster and on identity, pushing always against commodification, against a consumable narrative.
August 18
University of Pittsburgh Press
Gumbo Ya Ya, Aurielle Marie’s stunning debut, is a cauldron of hearty poems exploring race, gender, desire, and violence in the lives of Black gxrls, soaring against the backdrop of a contemporary South. These poems are loud, risky, and unapologetically rooted in the glory of Black gxrlhood. The collection opens with a heartrending indictment of injustice. What follows is a striking reimagination of the world, one where no Black gxrl dies “by the barrel of the law” or “for loving another Black gxrl.” Part familial archival, part map of Black resistance, Gumbo Ya Ya catalogs the wide gamut of Black life at its intersections, with punching cultural commentary and a poetic voice that holds tenderness and sharpness in tandem. It asks us to chew upon both the rich meat and the tough gristle, and in doing so we walk away more whole than we began and thoroughly satisfied.
August 19
Gold Line Press
A nature diary—in which it is human nature up for exploration—MARS Marshall’s FLOWER BOI utilizes received formal conventions in order to articulate that which resists the limitations of form or, as the poet puts it, “how space can be both void and / full is a trick only the BOI knows well.” Trick? No, there are no tricks or gimmicks here; this is a poet of ravishing innovation. The vowel, that “O” at the center of Marshall’s BOI, is passageway (“I try to make a map of my body / See which roads lead me to drink from / a river made by my hands…”); is apostrophe (“You, who turn your palms upward, gaze at the sky, proclaim I leave myself at the mercy of you…”); and is, at last, a hero’s journey from hole to whole to “How holy it is, to grab light of us and say, friend….” I can’t imagine a world where every debut is as fearless and brazen as Marshall’s FLOWER BOI.
—Tommye Blount, author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue
August 20
Anamot Press
Quiet Fires, the debut poetry collection from andriniki mattis, queries the everpresent questions of Black lives. Be it in a bakery in Brixton, London, at a corner on Malcolm X Blvd, Brooklyn, or the pews of Notre Dame, Paris – whether crossing violent borders on land or in gender, we know how it is to be in a familiar place that feels foreign.
As we follow along on bike rides over the Manhattan Bridge or sit alongside queer lovers in Bushwick, mattis reflects on the profound impact of pandemics, indifference, and heartbreak. In these lyrical and intimate poems that interrogate white spaces on the page and in the world with evocative metaphors, we wonder: “is there ever a party if you're always working this skin”— where can we feel safe and loved? In a world of climate change and the constant “twilight of violence”, be it gun violence or the expectations of capitalism, quiet fires erupt in these errant everyday moments. Centered around the experience of the Black queer, trans body, andriniki gabriel mattis uncovers the complexities of identity and the quest for self-discovery.
August 21
Heal Your Love is a Lambda Literary nominated poetry collection of lessons and remedies for femme survivors of trauma. With unflinching honesty, Merbruja delivers a book filled with hurt, hope, and honey for our open wounds.
Heal Your Love comes with 5 original illustrations by Roxana Dhada that begin each chapter of the book. The book cover and lettering are done by Mar Pascual. There are 40+ poems in the book that chronicle a journey through trauma, healing, and thriving.
August 22
Nightboat Books
In this debut collection by African American poet Xan Phillips, HULL explores emotional impacts of colonialism and racism on the Black queer body and the present-day emotional impacts of enslavement in urban, rural, and international settings. HULL is lyrical, layered, history-ridden, experimental, textured, adorned, ecstatic, and emotionally investigative.
August 23
One World
In m. mick powell’s polyphonic, haunting debut, a chorus of voices conjures up intimate pop herstories to map how the poet’s queer Black girlhood was molded by their memory. With tender reverence, powell meditates on the deaths of her own beloveds while reflecting on the many stages of an icon’s life: How did these women challenge conventional representations of Black femininity and transform the musical landscape? How did they navigate abuse and alienation in the limelight? How do the mythologies that survive them establish afterlives of queer femme possibility?
Through sensual imagery, speculative verse, and splendid wordplay, Dead Girl Cameo takes us beyond the headlines, innovating a Black feminist poetic that traverses the richly textured realms of grief, girlhood, love, widowing, femme friendship, and queer fandom.
August 24
Host Publications
With monstrous joy and tenderness untamed, Wayward Creatures is a collection that spills with the verdant language of excess, inviting us to step into its wild grasses. Here, the colonizer’s language has been overgrown by an ecology of strangeness and possibility—poetry disrupts, rituals, and revolts, rendering queer abolition irresistible.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes offers poems as portals into a “wilderness of intimacies” where the crip marvelous, the sacred profane, and trans love emerge in an ecstatic throng. With a poetics that resists taxonomy, many voices surge through this collection. They speak us new names, and urge us toward vibrant becomings.
This is deeply necessary, restorative work—kinning marigolds, cicadas, fungi, universes—Wayward Creatures dismantles the myth of separateness, inviting us to allow ourselves to be nourished by this living entanglement, ignited by mutual spark. From the burning map of this lexicon, may we learn “lessons / of fire,” how to “tend a basic flame / & char down the plantation.”
August 25
Mawenzi House Publishers
Wanting in Arabic is a refusal of convenient silences, convenient stories. The author dwells on the contradictions of a transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurations of lyric, ghazal, l’ecriture feminine, and, in particular, her own sexed voice. Without a memory of her father’s language, the questions her poems ask are those for a home known through photographs, for a language lost with childhood.
Braiding theoretical concerns with the ambivalences of sexed and raced identity, with profound romanticism, Wanting in Arabic attempts to traverse the fantasies of foundational loss and aggressive nostalgia in order to further a poetics of a conscious partiality of being, of generous struggle and comic rather than tragic misrecognition.
August 26
Diode Editions
In the spirit of documentary poetics, We Had Mansions is a luminous and unflinching debut by queer Palestinian Appalachian poet and journalist Mandy Shunnarah. Blending archival research with lived experience, Shunnarah composes poems that bear witness to the fractured geographies of diaspora, the disinformation campaigns that erase Palestinian humanity, and the personal and collective grief that is carried across generations.
These poems trace an intricate web of inheritance: the displacement of the Nakba and the echoes of exile in Alabama’s Bible Belt; religious trauma shaped by evangelical fundamentalism; the contradictions of assimilation; and the painful reconciliation of a family history marked by addiction, silence, and loss. With fierce clarity and lyrical precision, Shunnarah interrogates how Palestinians are depicted in Western media and asserts a counter-narrative rooted in truth, emotion, and unshakeable love for the homeland.
We Had Mansions resists reducing Palestinians to mere symbols of suffering. Alongside poems of resistance and survival, there are odes to joy, desire, and the domestic. Here, the sacred is complex, and the mythic is recast in the light of diaspora, with every love poem also serving as a Palestine poem. With formal dexterity and unwavering moral vision, Shunnarah claims space for a voice that is too often erased, transforming rage into testimony and tenderness into resistance. This is a vital new collection from a poet of searing insight and an expansive heart.
August 27
Arsenal Pulp Press
a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinized female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery.
In these visceral poems, teeth gleam, graze skin, and sink into flesh, becoming bloodied and exposing the animalistic hunger that lies within. Pulsating with yearning and possibility, a body more tolerable is a book that resists typical notions of physicality and sex to dream of a world more divine. It is a call-out into the canon for a new age, one filled with retribution and recompense.
August 28
DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e) Books
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.
August 29
Sibling Rivalry Press
In Abomination Pink, Zuggie Tate transforms survival into song, offering a fierce and luminous meditation on Black Trans womanhood, faith, desire, grief, and self-invention. Moving between the sanctuaries and wounds of church, family, community, and body, these poems confront violence without surrendering to it, insisting instead on joy, tenderness, rage, and radical self-definition. Tate crafts a mythology where Trans women are flowers, storms, saints, witches, martyrs, and gods unto themselves. Unflinching, intimate, and unforgettable, Abomination Pink is a chapbook of reclamation-a testament to the beauty that survives every attempt at erasure and the power of naming oneself into existence.
August 30
Aresenal Pulp Press
In her powerful debut collection of poetry, Arielle Twist unravels the complexities of human relationships after death and metamorphosis. In these spare yet powerful poems, she explores, with both rage and tenderness, the parameters of grief, trauma, displacement, and identity. Weaving together a past made murky by uncertainty and a present which exists in multitudes, Arielle Twist poetically navigates through what it means to be an Indigenous trans woman, discovering the possibilities of a hopeful future and a transcendent, beautiful path to regaining softness.
August 31
The Headlight Review
"As with all we tend, love is not linear. Some moments it breaks, others it flees like a comb from hair but it is here - where doubt ends and faith begins - that we find this dazzling collection of poems, moving us from our own understanding of expectation to the dream of reimagining. In Feminine Morbidity, we find an unapologetic writer able to walk the fine line of surprise and devotion, upending the long-held history of Western birthright and belonging. A lens that is at once an embodiment of resilience and uplift, this work is one of intention and reassertion. In an elevation of lineage and identity, Williams illustrates the true spark of liberation, acknowledging the spirit and language owed to that which we build in place of the empire."
— Olatunde Osinaike, 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize Judge
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