For Pride Month, observed annually during the month of June, we asked the many independent literary presses and magazines that make up our membership to share with us some of the literature by authors identifying as LGBTQ+ that they recommend reading in celebration.
Novels & Short Fiction Collections
Coach House Books | 2024
In this novel, “a queer writer traveling through India can’t escape the regrets of his past, nor the impending ruin of his present.”
Sister Golden Calf by Colleen Burner
Split/Lip Press | 2023
According to Alexis Smith, the sisters in this novel “face questions of longing and belonging, of how to care for each other and themselves, and of what artifacts to carry as they carry on.”
Translated from the Spanish by Heather Houde
Feminist Press | 2024
The stories in this debut collection depict “the disillusionment that comes with being young and queer in Puerto Rico.”
How You Were Born by Kate Cayley
Book*hug Press | 2024
This tenth-anniversary edition of How You Were Born, featuring three new stories, explores “the importance of connections, even when missed or mislaid, and the possibility of redemption.”
Bull City Press | 2021
This fiction chapbook is “a queer Taiwanese-American micro-retelling of Wuthering Heights, a love story and a ghost story simultaneously.”
Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Zamostny
Swan Isle Press | 2021
Set in early twentieth-century Spain, Hidden Path is “a lyrical coming-of-age novel told from the perspective of a woman painter who struggles to find her way with art and with the women she loved.”
The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel
Translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato
New Vessel Press | 2023
According to Patrick Nathan, Gardel’s National Book Award–winning novel “reminds its readers of an uncomfortable truth: that even a life of regret can be a beautiful one.”
I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat by Christopher Gonzalez
Santa Fe Writers Project | 2021
According to Ruth Joffre, this short fiction collection “captures all the messy joys and crackling anxieties of modern queer life, inviting readers to join its Puerto Rican characters on journeys punctuated by desire, shame, and grace.”
True Ash by Elizabeth J. Colen and Carol Guess
Black Lawrence Press | 2018
These interlocked short stories “detail the spectrum of human loss and describe the rise and fall of a fictitious Seattle company governed by unruly appetites, a world of glass windows where privacy comes with a price.”
Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights by Granand
Translated from the German by Michael Gillespie
Warbler Press | 2022
Set in 1920s Berlin, “these charming, witty, and erotic tales capture the trials and triumphs of early twentieth-century gay life without apology or shame.”
Beautiful Dreamers by Minrose Gwin
Hub City Press | 2024
Gwin’s novel is one “of innocence and betrayal, love and intolerance, and the care and honesty we owe the families we choose.”
God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu
A Public Space Books | 2023
In these nine stories about queer love in contemporary Nigeria, Ifeakandu “explores with tenderness and grace the fundamental question of the heart: can deep love and hope be sustained in spite of the dominant expectations of society, and great adversity.”
American Gospel by Miah Jeffra
Black Lawrence Press | 2023
According to Shobha Rao, this novel “is the story of Baltimore, and of how the places we call home are both our sorrow and our salvation.”
Call Me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujić
Translated from the Bosnian by Jennifer Zoble
Sandorf Passage | 2021
This novel “depicts pre- and post-war Sarajevo by charting a daughter coping with losing her mother, but discovering herself.”
The Default World by Naomi Kanakia
Feminist Press | 2024
Kanakia’s novel “skewers privileged leftist millennial tech culture and asks whether ‘found family’ is just another of the twenty-first century’s broken promises.”
Disobedience by Daniel Sarah Karasik
Book*hug Press | 2024
Disobedience is “a remarkable work of queer and trans speculative fiction that imagines how alternative forms of connection and power can refuse the violent institutions that engulf us.”
Finding Duende by Federico García Lorca
Translated from the Spanish by Christopher Maurer
Swan Isle Press | 2024
This new translation of Lorca’s lecture on duende “provides a path into Lorca’s poetics and the arts of Spain.”
The Secret That Is Not a Secret: Ten Heretical Tales by Jay Michaelson
Ayin Press | 2023
This novel is “a provocative collection of interconnected tales, bridging the worlds of mysticism and heresy, faith and desire.”
A Knit of Identity by Chris Motto
Regal House Publishing | 2022
In this novel, “Danny is left struggling to find her identity in a world that doesn’t want her. That is until she stumbles into a hole-in-the-wall bar in a small South Carolina town.”
The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen by Gary Eldon Peter
Regal House Publishing | 2022
This YA novel “follows fifteen-year-old Carl as he confronts his crush on Andy Olnan, a handsome and confident but secretive ‘city boy’ recently transplanted to farm life from Minneapolis.”
McSweeney’s | 2024
This debut novel “is a queer, Jewish, diasporic coming of age story that questions how our historical memory shapes our political and emotional present.”
flesh to bone by ire’ne lara silva
Aunt Lute Books | 2013
The stories in this debut collection “take on the force of myth, old and new, giving voice to those who experience the disruption and violence of the borderlands.”
Pearl of the Sea by Anthony Silverston and Raffaella Delle Donne
Catalyst Press | 2023
Illustrated by Willem Samuel, this YA novel “is a South African adventure story exploring how we are both bound to and freed by nature, seen through the eyes of a tough teen-aged heroine determined to live life by her own rules.”
BLF Press | 2018
According to Jewelle Gomez, in these stories Smith “writes of shape shifters, magical herbalists, and women ripe for love.”
Coach House Books | 2022
According to Deborah Willis, Taggart “illuminates the dark corners of delusion (or is it delusion?) and a mental-health system that consigns people to endless limbo.”
Nonfiction Books
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Fifth Edition by Gloria Anzaldúa
Aunt Lute Books | 2022
The essays and poems in this volume—originally published in 1987—“profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity.”
The Girl in the Yellow Pantsuit: Essays on Politics, History, and Culture by Becca Balint
Green Writers Press | 2022
This essay collection features Balint’s “clear-eyed perspectives on subjects as wide-ranging as American politics, global affairs, education policy, and parenthood.”
My Love Is a Beast: Confessions by Alexander Cheves
Unbound Edition Press | 2021
In this debut memoir, one of America’s leading sex columnists “tells intimate stories of what he sees as the sacred grace of pleasure as he embraces his life as a sex writer, worker, and activist.”
Bernie’s Mitten Maker by Jen Ellis
Green Writers Press | 2023
This memoir is “a raw and honest account of the joy, stress, and shock of sudden internet fame.”
Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist by Cecilia Gentili
LittlePuss Press | 2023
This book is “a rich and moving epistolary memoir about transgender childhood, sexual trauma, motherhood, and a young queer life in 1970s Argentina.”
The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition by Judy Grahn
Sinister Wisdom | 2023
A reprint of Judy Grahn’s 1985 classic, featuring a foreword by Alyse Knorr, an afterword by Alicia Mountain, and six responses by Donika Kelly, Kim Shuck, Serena Chopra, Zoe Tuck, Saretta Morgan, and Khadijah Queen.
Red Hen Press | 2024
This essay collection “sees mythical ravens murmur alongside the actual bone and viscera of crows, starlings, and pigeons in disarming explorations of desire and destruction, the body and creation.”
Splice of Life: A Memoir in 13 Film Genres by Charles Jensen
Santa Fe Writers Project | 2024
This memoir follows Jensen “from his upbringing and struggles with sexual awareness in rural Wisconsin to his sexual liberation in college and, finally, to the complex relationships and bizarre coincidences of adulthood.”
My Own Dear Darling Boy: The Letters of Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas
Warbler Press | 2021
This edition of surviving letters that Wilde wrote to Douglas, alongside introductory essays and a letter from Douglas, “is a testament to the enduring power and radical force of love.”
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan by Lou Sullivan
Nightboat Books | 2019
Edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma, these selected diaries narrate “the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century.”
Autumn House Press | 2023
In these braided essays, Wade “invites readers on a journey of self-discovery framed by memory, literature, and popular culture.”
McSweeney’s | 2023
Daddy Boy follows Whitney “as they pack into a van with a rag-tag group of storm chasers and drive up and down tornado alley—from Texas to North Dakota.”
Poetry Collections
Saltwater Demands a Psalm by Kweku Abimbola
Graywolf Press | 2023
Abimbola’s poems “groove, remix, and recenter African language and spiritual practice to rejoice in liberation’s struggles and triumphs.”
let the dead in by Saida Agostini
Alan Squire Publishing | 2022
Agostini’s debut poetry collection “is an exploration of the mythologies that seek to subjugate Black bodies, and the counter-stories that reject such subjugation.”
throttlebody by Lisa Alexander
Get Fresh Books Publishing | 2024
This poems in this debut collection “operate like the mechanism that gives the collection its name—they navigate the tension of an idling engine and the wildness of a wide-open throttle.”
An Empty Pot’s Darkness by José Angel Araguz
Airlie Press | 2019
This poetry collection “takes readers through a series of poetic sequences that engage with ideas of life, love, death, and friendship.”
Deer Black Out by Ulrich Jesse K. Baer
Red Hen Press | 2024
Deer Black Out is “a(n obsessional re) mediation of violence and trauma through the trans/coalescence of identities surfacing and resurfacing within a manuscript of serialized poetry.”
Passager Books | 2023
In his latest collection, Bergman “offers up poems about aging parents, love, chronic illness, and friendship.”
Meta-Verse!: It’s going to be interesting to see how yesterday goes by Joann Renee Boswell
Fernwood Press | 2023
Illustrated by Joey Hartmann-Dow and Jay Williams, this poetry collection is “a coloring, pick-your-own poem, space-time romp exploring pandemic, parenting, politics, personal, past.”
Perugia Press | 2002
Winner of the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Poetry Prize, Braverman’s poetry collection “is unselfconsciously about the search for love and security in the face of grief and within the queer community.”
The Wishbone Dress by Cassandra J. Bruner
Bull City Press | 2020
According to Paisley Rekdal, the poems in this chapbook “deliberately disrupt our conventional notions of identity and sexuality by blurring the lines between male and female, human and animal, the mythic and the real.”
Fling Diction by Frances Cannon
Green Writers Press | 2024
The poems in this collection, says Major Jackson, “name the luxuriant grounds by which a self, curious to touch creation, defines itself. Such vulnerability is the hallmark of living.”
Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return by CAConrad
Wave Books | 2024
In this collection, CAConrad “writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity.”
Portraits as Animal by Victoriano Cárdenas
Bloomsday Literary | 2023
In this collection—a finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry—”Cárdenas writes through his transition, acknowledging that ‘to become a man means a lifetime of needles like the man who raised me.'”
Tanto Tanto by Marina Carreira
CavanKerry Press | 2022
This poetry collection “highlights two queer daughters of immigrants and the struggles they face in a romantic relationship in the presence of oppressive, culturally sanctioned heteronormativity.”
Last Psalm at Sea Level by Meg Day
Barrow Street Press | 2014
According to D. A. Powell, “The vivid impermanence of the body is like kindling catching, a source of fire for Meg Day, a poet whose fearless heart is tethered to the world.”
Thresh & Hold by Marlanda Dekine
Hub City Press | 2022
This debut poetry collection explores the question, “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?”
Old Scratch Press | 2023
According to Crystal Heidel, this poetry collection is “a raw and curious visual journey through human history.”
Fernwood Press | 2023
Foley’s poetry collection “contemplates relationships, identity, love, loss, and radical transformation, finding acceptance, joy, and growing peace, as the speaker practices meditation, and falls more deeply in love with her wife.”
Salt Body Shimmer by Aricka Foreman
YesYes Books | 2020
The poems in this debut collection “coax and trouble form, traversing the landscape of trauma and survival with a deft musicality of time, family, and slippery memory.”
Spellbook for the Sabbath Queen by Elisheva Fox
Belle Point Press | 2023
“Part psalter, part Sapphic verse,” this debut collection “evokes the spirit of Emily Dickinson while calling the reader to prayer for a life fully lived.”
Live in Suspense by David Groff
Trio House Press | 2023
In these poems, Groff “writes about living between beginnings and endings, about always expecting the next mortal thing to happen.”
My Husband Would by Benjamin S. Grossberg
University of Tampa Press | 2020
My Husband Would “investigates love and family—both the families we are born into and those we create for ourselves.”
Sleep Tight Satellite by Carol Guess
Tupelo Press | 2023
According to Randall Brown, in this short fiction collection, Guess “builds the most wondrous word-nests, each one holding something precious, each one surrounded by the world-at-large, afire.”
Coachella Elegy by Christian Gullette
Trio House Press | 2024
This debut poetry collection “explores the queer promised lands and poolside utopias of the American West even as they are threatened by environmental destruction.”
The 3rd Thing | 2023
In this poetry collection, Hart “navigates the twisting dynamics of a family that is both Native and settler.”
Get Fresh Books Publishing | 2021
This collection offers “offers songs of survival, forgiveness, familial & lesbian love, & being ‘alive & determined to live all the way to the unfathomable depths / I once called abyss.’”
Song of My Softening by Omotara James
Alice James Books | 2024
Song of My Softening “studies the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness.”
WATCHNIGHT by Cyree Jarelle Johnson
Nightboat Books | 2024
This poetry collection follows “unnamed protagonist on a psychedelic quest across myriad forms, places, and times marked by climate crisis, exodus, and Black trans identity-making.”
Past/Present and Other Poems by Robert Kaplan
Poets of Queens | 2023
In this collection, Kaplan “uses detailed imagery to invite the reader into a slice of 1980s New York City: the urban landscape, the national politics, gay exuberance and loss, and, weaving throughout, the shadow of the AIDS epidemic.”
Feast of the Ass by Jahan Khajavi
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2023
“Drawing extensively on Iranian poetic traditions and the history of their reception in English translation,” Feast of the Ass “presents a series of verses that play in the fields of love poetry’s address.”
Mega-City Redux by Alyse Knorr
Switchback Books | 2016
In this poetry collection, Knorr imagines “a walled city where women could live safe from sexism, misogyny, and gendered violence… with the help of 21st-century feminist heroes.”
Ascent of the Mothers by Noelle Kocot
Wave Books | 2023
Kocot’s ninth collection is “a sagacious testament to the ways in which poetry can shape personhood.”
The Curve of Things by Kathy Kremins
CavanKerry Press | 2024
These poems “celebrate queer love, map loss and liberation, and explore lovers’ scars and the knot of kinship that remains even when love fades.”
My Body: New and Selected Poems by Joan Larkin
Hanging Loose Press | 2007
According to David Ulin, this poetry collection contains poems “that stake out a territory of relentless self-examination, taking on love and death, family and sexuality in a voice that is unsentimental, ruthless and clear-eyed.”
Tropical Sacrifice by Lucas de Lima
Birds, LLC | 2022
According to John Keene, Tropical Sacrifice is “a queer poetic event of continuous lyric & narrative transformation.”
Drive-By Vigils by R. Zamora Linmark
Hanging Loose Press | 2011
According to Rigoberto González, the poems in this collection take “readers on a high-speed chase to the heart of ‘today’s madness,’ where Manila intersects with Hollywood.”
Down Low and Low Down: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues by Timothy Liu
Barrow Street Press | 2023
The poems in Liu’s latest collection “are unruly, naughty, looking for trouble, not poems you’d want to recite at a traditional Thanksgiving table where proper etiquette rears its gagged head.”
Future Botanic by Christina Olivares
Get Fresh Books Publishing | 2023
According to Mahogany L. Browne, this collection is “a spectrum of girl bliss & gender, concrete gardens & blood conjure, and is a spiritually (re)evolutionary promise. The ‘botanical no-américa, inverse’ survives and revives us all.”
YesYes Books | 2024
Olson’s third collection “reports from inside butch culture in the 1980s American South as it traces how geography, family, experiences, and popular culture shape one queer life.”
Two Minutes of Light by Nancy K. Pearson
Perugia Press | 2008
In this collection, “the foil to self-destruction is art itself—finding small beauty in unlikely places and transforming it into poetry.”
AUTHOR OF ALL ILL by charlie perseus
fifth wheel press | 2023
This poetry collection is “both an ode to and an elegy for the author’s own falling.”
Jesus Comes to Me as Judy Garland by David J. S. Pickering
Airlie Press | 2021
Jesus Comes to Me as Judy Garland “explores themes of sexual orientation, spirituality, family, and aging, often using smart humor and sharp observation.”
Grid Books | 2022
In this poetry collection, Platt “makes a study of life’s inevitable transitions, from love’s astonishing evolutions, to aging and its attendant losses.”
Lily Poetry Review Books | 2021
According to Joy Ladin, Riel “traces the shimmering, fragile webs of love, experience, and culture that connect us to one another.”
while they sleep (under the bed is another country) by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
Birds, LLC | 2019
“Written in dialogic fragments and intersped with prose poems reflecting on the lasting impact of colonial trauma,” this bilingual poetry collection “refuses to sweep up the shards of Hurricane María’s aftermath.”
Wind—Mountain—Oak: The Poems of Sappho
Translated from the Greek by Dan Beachy-Quick
Tupelo Press | 2023
Of his translation of Sappho’s surviving fragments, Beachy-Quick writes, “The hope, far-fetched as it might be, is to give a reader in English some semblance of how an ancient Greek listener might hear these songs.”
Here at Last Is Love by Dunstan Thompson
Slant Books | 2015
This volume collects work by “an American poet of great promise who burst onto the Anglo-American literary scene during World War II.”
Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore
Autumn House Press | 2024
The poems in this collection “bask in the beauty of nature, queerness, and love while exploring how dichotomies form identity.”
I Am the Most Dangerous Thing by Candace Williams
Alice James Books | 2023
Over the course of these poems, “the Black, queer protagonist begins to erase violent structures and fill the white spaces with her hard-won wisdom and love.”
Plays & Hybrid Works
![banana [ ] / we pilot the blood by Paul Hlava Ceballos and Quenton Baker featuring a brown textured cover with the title and author’s names surrounding the edges vertically and horizontally.](https://www.clmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/banana-we-pilot-the-blood-300x300.png)
banana [ ] / we pilot the blood by Paul Hlava Ceballos and Quenton Baker
The 3rd Thing | 2021
This book includes a “critical /creative commentary on empire and the poetics of reckoning by Christina Sharpe in dialogue with the poems and artist Torkwase Dyson’s ‘hypershapes.’”
bull-jean & dem/dey back by Sharon Bridgforth
53rd State Press | 2022
bull-jean & dem/dey back “collects two performance/novels centering Sharon Bridgforth’s southern-Black-butch-sheroe, bull-jean.”
The Word’s Faire | 2024
This “genre-bending” book of poetry and prose “follows the life cycle of every life, as the mysterious narrator is cursed to live out humanity, and slowly become it.”
A and B and Also Nothing by Chris Campanioni
Unbound Edition Press | 2021
In this cross-genre work, Campanioni “reads and recasts his own life through the works of Henry James and Gertrude Stein.”
53rd State Press | 2020
Ignacio’s monologue “is at once a coming-of-age story, a horror story, and a highly theatrical experiment in radical empathy” and asks, “where do we draw the line between human and monster, severing, as we do so, the possibility of empathy, forgiveness, and understanding?”
Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir by Rajiv Mohabir
Restless Books | 2021
Mohabir’s memoir is “a portrait of an artist who comes into his own as a poet and as a queer brown man through the songs of his unlettered grandmother” that asks “how we can find survival and collective power by refusing silence.”
Switchback Books | 2015
According to Dawn Lundy Martin, And/Or “interrogates the line between the erotic and the perverse, as any sex literature worth anything should.”
Joan of Arkansas by Milo Wippermann
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2023
Joan of Arkansas is “an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video.”
Anthology
Lez Talk: A Collection of Lesbian Short Fiction
BLF Press | 2016
Edited by S. (Stephanie) Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle, this anthology is “a collection of short stories that embraces the fullness of Black lesbian experiences.”
Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers
LittlePuss Press | 2021
Originally published in 2017, this book is “a large, strange, and devastatingly touching anthology of science fiction and fantasy from transgender authors was released onto the world.”
Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology
Autumn House Press | 2022
Edited by Michael Walsh, this anthology featuring more than 200 queer writers “amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry.”
Someplace Generous: An Inclusive Romance Anthology
Generous Press | 2024
Edited by Elaina Ellis and Amber Flame, this anthology “presents voices largely new to the genre of romance, each bringing a fresh take on what it means to tell a love story.”
We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics
Nightboat Books | 2020
In this poetry anthology edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, intergenerational trans poets “imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.”
Literary Magazines
“Sexuality” by Dhayana Alejandrina
Wellspringwords | 2021
This poem begins, “She found me at a really young age. / Opening myself like a fragile book, / I welcomed her.”
“Crosswalk Countdown” by Rahne Alexander
The Hopkins Review | 2023
This essay begins, “I missed my mother’s funeral. I had my reasons: I couldn’t afford a ticket and I didn’t want to deal with the judgmental homophobia of her church.”
“The Beginning” by Byron F. Aspaas
Terrain.org | 2024
This prose poem begins, “The first school I attended was an Indian boarding school. I remember the first day of kindergarten. I remember seeing my mom leave quickly when I ran towards her.”
“I Turn Off My Phone For Self-Care But History Keeps Happening” by Evelyn Berry
manywor(l)ds | 2024
This piece begins, “While I’m logged off, a new hashtag: this time a transfemme, beaten to death.”
“Minnie Mouse Toy” by Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
Another Chicago Magazine | 2023
This poem begins, ““Would you like a Hot Wheel or a Barbie, sir?” / The words float like ghosts in front of me / when I speak them, frozen by the winter air / whipping in through the drive-thru window.”
“Contingency Plan or Just in Case” by Celene Chen
West Trestle Review | 2022
This essay begins, “When we first moved into our apartment, I found myself repeatedly saying, ‘Oh, you know, just in case,’ to my girlfriend.”
“Fugue in DMZ/Frontera” by Franny Choi
Adi Magazine | 2023
This poem begins, “red crowned crane, and / my browser calls up / an image from a cage….”
“Event Horizon” by Aliyah Cotton
Southern Humanities Review | 2024
This poem begins, “Sometimes I wake as a copperhead weaving night through the window. / They keep a BB gun in the kitchen for me, but I am not afraid….”
Cincinnati Review | 2023
This poem begins, “wrists’ stiff leaks / wrists limp loose in afterglow // my body might make itself / sculpture on the chant of three….”
“My Mother’s Furniture” by Julie R. Enszer
Does It Have Pockets? | 2024
This essay begins, “Moving back to my childhood home with my wife, our two dogs and cat, was a fluke.”
“Libera Me” by Judith Fetterley
Under the Sun | 2024
This essay begins, “I perfected the art of performing femininity quite early. By thirteen I knew to cross my legs at the ankle, not the knee.”
An Interview with Isabel Pabán Freed
Full Stop | 2024
In this conversation with Katherine Packert Burke, Isabel Pabán Freed discusses “political novels, Trans Lit, and David Foster Wallace.”
“Meditation on Longing” by Cass Garison
Shō Poetry Journal | 2023
Garison reads the poem “Meditation on Longing” in this recording.
“Walking While Trans; Or, 200 Years of the Stroll” by Jules Gill-Peterson
The Hopkins Review | 2023
This essay begins, “There’s a viral video that appears in my social media feed from time to time. Dislocated from its context by the scale of internet circulation, it looks like footage of a news crew setting up on location along a busy avenue somewhere in Brazil.”
Does It Have Pockets? | 2024
This poem begins, “For a three bit glass of beer from / a hundred dollar bill. // I struggled to make the correct change….”
“Watering Day” by Mónica Gomery
SWWIM | 2022
This poem begins, “Jess brings all the plants into the bathroom. / Countertops glow neon jade, / the tub sprouts palm fingers, fiddlehead fig.”
manywor(l)ds | 2024
This poem begins, “Once, I drowned a bird / in the backyard / and it turned / into a whale.”
Full Stop | 2023
In this conversation with Rebecca van Laer, Sam Heaps discusses the epistolary memoir Proximity “and its lessons about the pain and power of writing.”
West Trestle Review | 2023
This poem begins, “This happens in September of a year / when the garden just keeps going.”
“They Want To Run Us (Into Our Graves)” by E Kerr
Another Chicago Magazine | 2023
This poem begins, “Sometimes I wish I could take a bullet / to all the voices in my head. // In my head, all the voices shoot / bullets, and deaths become whispered syllables.”
“Unfinished Houses” by Ani King
SmokeLong Quarterly | 2023
This story begins, “I always fall in love with women who have never lived in unfinished houses.”
“The Find” by Matthew Lansburgh
The Keepthings | 2021
This piece begins, “When I was a boy, my father and I sometimes went to Cripple Creek, Colorado, to hunt for turquoise.”
“To Live Free” by Laila R. Makled
Adi Magazine | 2023
This essay begins, “On Trans Day of Visibility last year, I posted a photo of myself after top surgery, and commented on what it means to be trans.”
The Keepthings | 2023
This piece begins, “‘Is that the Turkish coffee maker I bought in Paris?’ I asked my mother, as if I were seeing it for the first time.”
“Unclean: What Foraging Wild Fungi Taught Me About Impurity Culture” by Sophia Moss
The Hopper | 2024
This essay begins, “I smelled them before I saw them, a sprawling cluster of Pleurotus pulmonarius, pale oyster mushrooms erupting from a stump and filling the air with their gentle licorice scent.”
“The Light at Dusk” by John Mulcare
The Hudson Review | 2023
This poem begins, “We were boys, my friend / and I, stripping down // beside the bed / in his parents’ guest room.”
“To the Women I Watched Kiss” by Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson
Off Assignment | 2023
This essay begins, “Were you already walking around Paris together that Saturday afternoon as my train pulled into the Gare du Nord? Or were you locked away from the rain somewhere, lost in the vastness of loving each other?”
ANMLY | 2020
According to guest editor tanner menard, “In each their own way, the poems published in this folio haveunique medicine & subtle power. Together, they are a testament to the beauty of all Indigenous communities & they sing.”
“Don’t Look at the Owls” by Audacia Ray
The Hopper | 2024
This story begins, “There are two things about feeding the owls that the ranger made sure Robin understood on day one: there’s a freezer full of dead rats and mice that she’d have to get very comfortable dealing with, and owls feel threatened by eye contact, especially in small spaces.”
“The Trans Girl’s Guide to Grey’s Anatomy” by Erica Rivera
Under the Sun | 2024
This essay begins, “You’ll start watching Grey’s Anatomy because—four years into puberty, at 13—you’re already familiar with imminent death.”
“Interior Vs. Exterior” by Sarah Sala
SWWIM | 2019
This poem begins, “At my worst, I control the / boundaries of my form, / and yet, when divine, the self / permeates the / physical world.”
“Ponytail” by Christopher Santantasio
SmokeLong Quarterly | 2023
This story begins, “You remember when Dad shaved his mustache. How thin his lips were.”
A Soft Reset: Queer Writers of Color on Video Games
ANMLY | 2023
Guest edited by Summer Farah, this folio features writing by Stephanie Dinsae, Nathanial Torres, Nancy Huang, Marlin M. Jenkins, Lyn Rafil, JS Wu, Harriette Chan, Gyasi Hall, and Felix Lecocq.
“To Divine, from Grindr” by Ani Kayode Somtochukwu
Off Assignment | 2024
This essay begins, “You sat next to me on the sofa, and asked to take off my shirt when I told you it was wet from wandering in the rain.”
“Yes, and… Talking Wings, Queer Ecologies, and the Rights of Rivers” by Ana Maria Spagna
Terrain.org | 2024
This essay begins, “Earth Day fell on a sunny Saturday, the first truly warm day of spring in the North Country.”
“blood of the covenant // water of the womb” by Anoushka Swaminathan
Polyphony Lit | 2023
This poem begins, “i let their voices wash over me, / laying side by side on the side of 101 south….”
Sinister Wisdom | 2023
Issue 128 celebrates “writers and artists who trouble gender,” exploring questions like, “What perspectives do trans lives bring to the field of feminist thought and practice? What does it mean to hold a conversation about being trans? What does it mean to be a part of that conversation?”
“to being girls together” by Aarna Tyagi
Polyphony Lit | 2023
This poem begins, “you / with your pork-belly facing the butcher’s shop / guns ablaze / one hand on my shaven head….”
Cincinnati Review | 2024
This poem begins, “One morning I woke up to myself, blank-faced as the Shroud of Turin—a stranger. / Now, makeup in the mirror. That it’s beautiful or mine: can’t tell which is stranger.”
