Poetry Books by Trans, Nonbinary, & Genderqueer Writers for The Sealey Challenge

It's time for another year of The Sealey Challenge, a reading challenge created by Nicole Sealey in 2017. This following list offers 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

Villainy by Andrea Abi-Karam

Nightboat Books

In order to live through the grief of the Ghost Ship Fire and the Muslim Ban, Villainy foments political action in public spaces, and indexes the various emotional states, such as rage, revelry, fear, grief, and desire to which queers must tend during protest. In scenes loaded with glitter, broken glass, and cum, Abi-Karam insists that in order to shatter the rising influence of new fascism we must embrace the collective work of antifascists, street medics, and queer exhibitionists and that the safety that we risk is reckless and necessary. Disruptive and demanding, these punk poems embody direct action and invite the audience into the desire-filled slippage between public sex and demonstration. At heart, Villainy aims to destroy all levels of hierarchy to establish a participatory, temporary autonomous zone in which the targeted other can thrive.

August 2

the specimen's apology by George Abraham

Sibling Rivalry Press

“From the first, devastating poem (‘i touch myself & do not leak gold’), George Abraham’s poems bristle with alchemy, a narrative of love, history, family, and Palestine that pulses with longing. ‘You cannot know the way you split galaxies/with a single breath,’ he says, a prophecy that unfolds throughout the collection, where the speaker reclaims himself, his grief and—yes—his land, over and over. Juxtaposed with Leila Abdelrazaq’s startlingly evocative artwork, the specimen’s apology is a fearless, riveting excavation of self and other.” —Hala Alyan

August 3

Dear Spanish by Mateo Acuña

Poetry Northwest Editions

The ninth collection in the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Series, Dear Spanish is a tender exploration of the languages of identity, gender, and family. This chapbook was written in partnership with the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate program, a program of Seattle Arts & Lectures.

August 4

Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul by Ryka Aoki

Biyuti Publishing

“In the old old days, Ryka Aoki would be tagged as some kind of prophet, and the thumbsucking masses, bewildered & flummoxed by her talking stories, would stone or torch her. Forged from the ceaseless grappling match with life, living, identity, obligations, duty, home & selfhood, the poems in this striking collection are a libretto of what survives, what is elusive, what transforms or transmogrifies, and what remains primal & elemental.” –Justin Chin, Author of Gutted, and Bite Hard

August 5

Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Persea Books

In his second collection, Cameron Awkward-Rich reckons with American violence, while endeavoring to live and love in its shadow. Set against a media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, these poems grapple with news of racial and gendered violence in the United States today an in its past. 

August 6

More Than Organs by Kay Ulanday Barrett

Sibling Rivalry Press

A love letter to Brown, Queer, and Trans futures, Kay Ulanday Barrett’s More Than Organs questions "whatever wholeness means” for bodies always in transit, for the safeties and dangers they silo. These poems remix people of color as earthbenders, replay “the choreography of loss” after the 2015 Pulse shooting, and till joy from the cosmic sweetness of a family’s culinary history. Barrett works "to build / a shelter // of / everyone / [they] meet,” from aunties to the legendary Princess Urduja to their favorite air sign. More Than Organs tattoos grief across the knuckles of its left hand and love across the knuckles of its right, leaving the reader physically changed by the intensity of experience, longing, strength, desire, and the need, above all else, to survive.

August 7

Insubordinate by Ebo Barton

Insubordinate is spoken word poet, Ebo Barton's first collection of work. Through this collection of work they discover themselves, acknowledge their history and navigate a world not ready for their existence. Writer, Educator, Archivist and Seattle Civic Poet, Anastacia Reneé says, "Ebo Barton's work is never out of style, misshapen, or late but, always a necessary sacred text, spiritually nourishing for gritty-truth-seekers & always, always on time." Author of "Bring Down the Chandeliers", "My, My, My, My, My" and Washington State Book Award Winner, Tara Hardy says, “Ebo Barton is the queer echo to the first whisper of revolution. Backlash to cynicism, they’ll have you believing in yourself again.”

August 8

Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Nightboat Books

Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations. Oliver Baez Bendorf’s voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.

August 9

Surge by Jay Bernard

Penguin

Jay Bernard's extraordinary debut is a fearless exploration of the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in which thirteen young black people were killed.

Dubbed the 'New Cross Massacre', the fire was initially believed to be a racist attack, and the indifference with which the tragedy was met by the state triggered a new era of race relations in Britain.

Tracing a line from New Cross to the 'towers of blood' of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice.

August 10

Freedom House by KB Brookins

Deep Vellum

In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins’ formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different “rooms”. The speaker isn’t afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more — all while using humor and craft.

What does freedom look like? What can we learn from nature and our past? How do you reintroduce yourself in a world that refuses queerness? How can we use poetry as a tool in the toolbox that helps build freedom? This collection explores those questions, and manifests a world where Black, queer, and trans people get to live.

August 11

Togetherness by Wo Chan

Nightboat Books

Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.

August 12

recombinant by Ching-In Chen

Kelsey Street Press

Can a poetry seek to examine the erasure and reconstruction of a community history? Ching-In Chen’s recombinant is a work of material critique, philosophically jarring in its use of syntax, sound, the erasures held in the stillness of its whitespace that again and again mimic a historical registry. Drafting and growing multiple discourses, this text urges the reader to investigate female and genderqueer lineages in the context of labor smuggling and trafficking. Its syntactical utterances create a music that is masterful in these poems’ fractured words and experimental representation of page and praxis. Voices from various communities interact with each other to create what Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan calls an assertion of diasporan realities where multi-directional, heterogeneous modes of representation challenge conventional representation via photographs; newspaper articles; maps; city directories; records of immigration, birth, and death; as well as scholarly research and archaeological records. recombinant is a work of insistence, a refusal of erasure, a proof of shared memory through the rewriting and remixing of historical remnant.

August 13

Fire Power by Chrystos

Press Gang

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

Year of the Unicorn Kidz by jason b. crawford

Sundress Publications

Jason B. Crawford’s Year of the Unicorn Kidz beautifully explores existence on the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. Their profound navigation of identity, violence, and desire transcends boundaries and binaries. Vulnerability takes the centre stage as the speaker of these descriptive and passionate poems unburies old relationships and haunting memories. Year of the Unicorn Kidz reads like a coming-of-age story for marginalized youth in America, sketching the body in terms of disconnection, loss, and the explosive nature of desire. From burning rage to healing friendships to the thrill of forbidden encounters and the regrets that follow them, Crawford revisits the reckless elements of youth that capture the inner and outer conflicts of self-discovery. They bring incredible depth to their poetry with urgent and vivid storytelling that delicately reveals the complexity of reality, while also leaving room for readers to reflect on their own.

August 15

I Don't Want To Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Alice James Books

A transsexual woman pieces together fragmented details of a repressive religious childhood and an unsupportive family, drawing from autobiographical experiences of the poet’s life.

I Don’t Want To Be Understood is a work of resistance against the conventional trans narrative, and a resistance against the idea that trans people should have to make themselves clear and understandable to others in other to deserve human rights. This is a compelling, urgent collection about the body and survival that asks how we learn to love in a culture where normal is defined by exclusion and discrimination.

These poems stretch from childhood to the present day—resisting typical narratives of self-discovery, resilience, and personal growth—and instead asks what it means to be granted or denied personhood by the world around you. It is a personal archive of a trans life laid out in all its messiness and unknowability, and is a book for anyone who has questioned why we place so many limitations on who gets to be considered a human being. These poems do not celebrate survival, but rather ask why transsexuals and other gender non-conforming people must fight so hard to survive in the first place.

August 16

Reprise by Golden

Haymarket Books

A visual & lyrical declaration filled with fever & flight, Reprise, Golden’s second collection of poetry & photography, maps a personal search for safety in a US that offers none.

Golden’s collection illuminates a path through national uprisings, anti-trans violence, family loss, and a global pandemic. These sonically playful poems and assertive, color-saturated portraits reveal a stark vulnerability that invites readers to look deeply at times of great and, possibly, liberatory uncertainty.

At its heart, this collection asks: Where is home? Who is free? What makes a nation?

Golden seeks portals towards self-liberation. In their pursuit, we’re invited to witness and learn from their interior revolution, from which they emerge more free to declare themselves in small and large ways: Whether stating I just want to wear my orange dress to the tennis courts & come back home unbothered or I am home in the arms of the armed. 

Building on their debut collection A Dead Name That Learned How to Live and their award-winning self-portraiture series On Learning How to Live, Golden honors the living siege & sorrow, rage & revival, joy & creation of being Black and trans in America.

August 17

Hood Criatura by féi hernandez

Sundress Publications

In this stunning debut collection, Inglewood-raised poet féi hernandez weaves an intricate latticework of stories in the betwixt and between. Hood Criatura explores the intersections of trans and queer resilience, citizenship and belonging, and resistance against gentrification that threatens both city and the body. hernandez’s poems take us through a coming-of-age story that delineates the existential wars of gender, race, sexuality, and im/migration, as well as the pains and joys that bind communities, family, and love. In a world that seeks to simplify and reduce the self to binary boundaries, Hood Criatura serves as a reminder of what it means to exist unbounded, to claim all of the multitudes within us that make us who we are. Masterfully juxtaposed in myriad poetic forms throughout the book, these poems are a love letter to all of us who exist within liminal spaces and who dare to claim one’s true self.

August 18

Still My Father's Son by Nora Hikari

Sundress Publications

Still My Father's Son by Nora Hikari weaves a complex & delicate tale of love, religious trauma, queerness, and self/selves. As we are systematically walked upstream through a shimmering river in which shrewd emotion and aching observations cascade, we bear witness to God & the lessons of his son, Uriel; to the speaker declaring that “Every person you have been deserves a burial and a headstone;” to the Vicious Self pleading to the Small Self, repeatedly through burning tears, that she is loved. A devastating intimacy surrounds this collection, omnipresent in moments where language is sharp enough to cut. Hikari's work is an exploration into self-love at its most fractured and literal, and a beautiful homage to what it means to heal from/with/by deep-rooted pain. For, despite all the hurt in the world, “you can live. You can. You can live for all of the people we could be tomorrow, if you try.”

August 19

Bury Me in Thunder by syan jay

Sundress Publications

Bury Me in Thunder, the full-length debut by syan jay, is an eviscerating collection, suffused with nature, ceremony, and pain. Here, a mother gives birth in a field of flowers, a child emerges from the stomach of a whale, while the speaker keeps working to locate “the epicenter of tenderness.” Delivering an unflinching look into the consumption of Indigenous people, this collection sheds new light on the colonization of North America and how trauma is carried through intergenerational memory. In heartbreaking juxtaposition, the speaker presents the old and new worlds side by side, melding the two in stunning images while weaving folklore into the magic of these poems. To read this collection is to observe a brewing storm, to bear witness to the unburying of ancestors and their release as monsoon.

August 20

Local Woman by Jzl Jmz

Nightboat Books

Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

August 21

Coconut Milk by Dan Taulapapa

University of Arizona Press

Coconut Milk is a fresh, new poetry collection that is a sensual homage to place, people, love, and lust. The first collection by Samoan writer and painter Dan Taulapapa McMullin, the poems evoke both intimate conversations and provocative monologues that allow him to explore the complexities of being a queer Samoan in the United States.  

McMullin seamlessly flows between exposing the ironies of Tiki kitsch–inspired cultural appropriation and intimate snapshots of Samoan people and place. In doing so, he disrupts popular notions of a beautiful Polynesia available for the taking, and carves out new avenues of meaning for Pacific Islanders of Oceania. Throughout the collection, McMullin illustrates various manifestations of geopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and sexual colonialism. His work illuminates the ongoing resistance to colonialism and the remarkable resilience of Pacific Islanders and queer-identified peoples.

McMullin’s Fa’a Fafine identity—the ability to walk between and embody both the masculine and feminine—creates a grounded and dynamic voice throughout the collection. It also fosters a creative dialogue between Fa’a Fafine people and trans-Indigenous movements. Through a uniquely Samoan practice of storytelling, McMullin contributes to the growing and vibrant body of queer Indigenous literature.

August 22

Prayers for My 17th Chromosome by Amir Rabiyah

Sibling Rivalry Press

“Amir Rabiyah is a magician who has tasted salt of the creation story’s sea. The cleaving of human to spirit found in Prayers for My 17th Chromosome is a blood tangle that will kiss your cells till you sweat / constellations. Rabiyah reminds their reader that to exist in between boxes of national belongings, migrations, queer kinships, and disability is not to swallow war. Rather, in these verses, complications find respite in one another, [becoming] the endless, / the source, / the horizon / awakening.” - Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd’s Son and The Taxidermist’s Cut

August 23

Deus Ex Nigrum by Jasmine Reid

Honeysuckle Press

With its flora crossing boundaries, Deus Ex Nigrum is, above all else, an invitation to bloom. This chapbook of poems holds a speaker remapping her body, which travels from a site of betrayal to one of renewal. Enacted here is an interlocution of self and body, a configuration outside of canonical human experience, a trans speaker who so finds posterity & futurity in the surround of human being: flowers, seasons, satellitic cyclings. 

These poems, forever embarking on the commute between monster and human, paint for us the hypervisibility and interior awe that accompany a trans femme’s movement through urban landscapes. Despite being rooted in Baltimore and Brooklyn, there is an unmistakable pull towards the botanical and the cosmic. These poems take us upwards and outwards, coiling and opening with a kaleidoscopic preference for synergy, oceania, and beauty. There is a persistent vulnerability which accumulates & allows the text to arrive upon a new speaker, one who knows herself & says, "here is who i am. i am. i am."

August 24

antes que isla es volcán / before island is volcano by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera

Beacon Press

From the National Book Award-nominated, Lambda Award-winning poet: a powerful, inventive new collection that looks to the future of Puerto Rico with love, rage, beauty, and hope

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s star has risen swiftly in the poetry world, and this, his 6th book, promises to cement his status as one of the most important poets working today. In sharp, crystalline verses, written in both Spanish and English versions, antes que isla es volcán daringly imagines a decolonial Puerto Rico.

Salas Rivera unfurls series after series of poems that build in intensity: one that casts Puerto Rico as the island of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, another that imagines a multiverse of possibilities for Puerto Rico’s fate, a 3rd in which the poet demands his right to a future and its immediate distribution. The verses are rigorous and sophisticated, engaging with literary and political theory, yet are also hard-hitting, charismatic, and quotable (“won’t you be sorry? / won’t you wish you had a boss? / won’t you get restless / with all that freedom?”).

These poems tap unflinchingly into the explosive energy of the island, transforming it into protest, into spirit, into art.

August 25

Bluff by Danez Smith

Graywolf Press

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.  

Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America's acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem—part map, part annotation, part visual argument—offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love—those given and made—are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

August 26

TERROR COUNTER by Fargo Nissim Tbhaki

Deep Vellum

Moving through sections of varying experimentalism, from an invented visual form (the Gazan Tunnel) to all-caps queer ecstatic, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi here attempts to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood.

The voices in this collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability and the spirit of a collective liberation; they move in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode that facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life. TERROR COUNTER asks: where and how might a Palestinian subject escape the public consumption of American letters? And, ultimately, how can we continue to love each other amidst the endless terror of the colonial world?

August 27

a place called No Homeland by Kai Cheng Thom

Arsenal Pulp

This extraordinary poetry collection is a vivid, beautifully wrought journey to the place where forgotten ancestors live and monstrous women roam--and where the distinctions between body, land, and language are lost. In these fierce yet tender narrative poems, Kai Cheng Thom draws equally from memory and mythology to create new maps of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. In the world of a place called No Homeland, the bodies of the marginalized--queer and transgender communities, survivors of abuse and assault, and children of diaspora--are celebrated, survival songs are sung, and the ancestors offer you forgiveness for not remembering their names.

Descended from the traditions of oral storytelling, spoken word, and queer punk poetry, Kai Cheng Thom's debut collection is evocative and unforgettable.

August 28

All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran

Penguin Books

Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran’s debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling 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.

August 29

found them by Francisco-Luis White

The first released work of poetry from White, Found Them deals with physical and spiritual place along an arduous but liberating gender and sexuality journey. This chapbook includes seventeen poems which explore transformation and departure as means of survival, as well as ancestral magic as an omnipresent resource.

August 30

Blood Orange by Yaffa

Meraj Publishing

Blood Orange is a highly emotional, important and timely poetry collection by Mx. Yaffa (They/She), a trans Muslim displaced Indigenous Palestinian. Their writings probe the yearning for home, belonging, mental health, queerness, transness, and other dimensions of marginalization while nurturing dreams of utopia against the background of ongoing displacement and genocide of indigenous Palestinians.

The collection came quickly and relentlessly, drawn from the depths of the author's soul during a movement for a free Palestine and aligned with a solar eclipse. It beckons readers to re-evaluate what is perceived as immutable and to imagine pathways toward Utopia.

Blood Orange- the title an homage to the Yaffa Oranges (which were appropriated first by the British and subsequently by Israel) refers to the author themselves, their homeland and blood spilled in the name of settler colonialism.

This highly charged and cathartic body of work confronts the anguish and loss inflicted by genocide but also embraces a vision of a world free of it. The poems within Blood Orange were a means of working through and processing the grief caused by recent events and serve as an act of protest and defiance against settler colonialism as a whole.

August 31

Dream of the Divided Field by Yanyi

One World

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.