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.
Fiction
Plastic, Prism, Void by Violet Allen
LittlePuss Press | 2026
ISBN: 9781964322025
In this novel, a “magical girl-gone-bad and a renegade mech pilot must stay on a date forever, even if it means destroying the world.”
The Iron Below Remembers by Sharang Biswas
Neon Hemlock | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-952086-94-6
In this novella that is “equal parts pulp caper and meta-textual academic text,” protagonist “Laxman Yadav is dating Saviour, one of the world’s most famous superheroes, while also investigating possibly the most important archeological find of all time.”
Tell the Rest by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Akashic Books | 2023
ISBN: 9781636140797
In this novel, “two estranged childhood friends find themselves on parallel paths to return to the site of the conversion therapy camp that tore them apart.”
Call and Response by Christopher Caldwell
Neon Hemlock | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-952086-94-6
According to Izzy Wasserstein, these stories are “visions of doomed whaling voyages, bank robbers on the run from arcane enforcers, desperate characters confronting the world’s evils, gods and saints, betrayals and joys.”
Crossing Paths: Queer Moments That Changed Everything
Our Bold Voices | 2026
ISBN: 979-8990194076
This anthology of short stories—featuring Russell Alexander-Orozco, Mercury Aquarius, Dana Baylous, and more—explores “how small coincidences that bring people together can create special, unforgettable bonds.”
The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen by Gary Eldon Peter
Regal House Publishing | 2022
ISBN: 9781646032532
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.”
The Dyke and the Dybbuk by Ellen Galford
Sinister Wisdom | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-944981-91-4
This novel originally published in 1993 is “a tongue-in-cheek Jewish folklore featuring corporate demons, a yearning lesbian, and something like a romance.”
The Museum of Future Mistakes by James R. Gapinski
Boa Editions | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-960145-86-4
In their collection of short stories, Gapinski “considers our physical relationship with our own bodies, how we process love and loss, and the fragility of identity amid moments of personal crisis.”
The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel
Translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato
New Vessel Press | 2023
ISBN: 9781954404120
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.”
Sleep Tight Satellite by Carol Guess
Tupelo Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-946482-90-7
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.”
The Moonstone Covenant by Jill Hammer
Ayin Press | 2024
ISBN: 9781961814158
In Hammer’s fantasy novel, “Istehar Sha’an, whose unique powers allow her to communicate with trees and books, has led her community of refugee forest people to a remarkable place.”
Pocky: An Octopus Learns Consent by Arielle Haughee
Orange Blossom Publishing | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-949935-68-4
In this children’s book, “when a new fish comes to the reef who doesn’t want to be hugged, Pocky must learn how to make friends without touching.”
They Marched Under the Sun by Cris Judar
Translated from the Portuguese by Lara Norgaard
Fonograf Editions | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-964499-63-5
This novel is about “violence, religious persecution, the loss of freedom and rights, as well as a statement on our need for ritual, dreams, and the resignification of bodies and social roles.”
She Who Remains by Rene Karabash
Translated from the Bulgarian by Izidora Angel
Sandorf Passage | 2026
ISBN: 9789533515748
This novel is set in a “rural Albanian village where, to this day, the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini—a collection of archaic laws—looms over the lives of villagers with the same haunting presence of the surrounding mountains.”
Stories from the Edge of the Sea by Andrew Lam
Red Hen Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781636282428
The fourteen stories in this collection “explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California.”
The Secret That Is Not a Secret by Jay Michaelson
Ayin Press | 2023
ISBN: 9798986780399
The characters in these interlocking stories “are pious and rebellious, mystical and queer, from a Hasidic woman tormented by her husband’s long beard to a closeted gay man repenting of his sins in the mikva.”
A Knit of Identity by Chris Motto
Regal House Publishing | 2022
ISBN: 9781646032778
In this novel, protagonist 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.”
You Make Yourself Another by Lucy Hannah Ryan
Half Mystic Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-948552-15-8
“Named for an insult hurled at Hamlet’s Ophelia,” this short fiction collection “blurs genre and gender lines to illuminate a state of sharp, queer flux.”
Words My Friends Have Thrown Away by Samantha Ryan
Something Involving A Mailbox! | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-955714-02-0
Words My Friends Have Thrown Away “collects flash fiction based on crowd-sourced words bound to queer identities.”
Restless Books | 2018
ISBN: 9781632061508
Simo’s debut novel tells “the uproarious story of a thwarted writer’s elaborate revenge on the woman who stole her lover, blending elements of telenovela, pulp noir, and dystopian satire.”
Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Burrow Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-941681-28-2
In this horror novelette, “a quaint but awkward first meeting unravels into a nightmare in which the narrator finds herself stranded in a family’s decades-long mourning ritual.”
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuang-zi
Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Graywolf Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64445-315-5
Winner of the International Booker Prize 2026, this novel “unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.”
Nonfiction, Drama, Hybrid, and Multi-Genre Works
Akashic Books | 2025
ISBN: 9781636142692
In this memoir, a “founder of the iconic band Faith No More shares his coming-of-age and out-of-the-closet story in pre–tech boom San Francisco.”
Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) by Claude Cahun
Translated from the French by Susan de Muth
Siglio | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-938221-36-1
This redesigned and revised edition of Cahun’s “wildly radical answer to an invitation to write a memoir” includes novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan’s original 1930 preface along with contemporary essays by scholar Amelia Groom and translator de Muth.
Backyard Alchemy: On Life with Other Creatures in a Time of Salvage by J. D. Ho
River River Books | 2026
ISBN: 9798992611625
This collection of environmental essays “transforms the loss of climate stability, relationships, health, and ecological integrity into sites of repair and restoration.”
Achy Affects: Crisis and Compositions of Selfhood by CE Mackenzie
University of Pittsburgh Press | 2025
ISBN: 9780822948568
Achy Affects is “a trans-genre memoir that boldly reimagines how we care for ourselves and our communities amidst relentless cultural, political, and ecological upheavals.”
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-946604-43-9
Edited by David J. Getsy and Patrick Greaney, these letters “show a vibrant transnational queer artistic friendship and offer a new perspective on the struggle to establish conceptual, critical artistic practices in the Americas.”
Dyke Delusions: Essays & Observations by Samantha Mann
Read Furiously | 2025
ISBN: 9781960869166
This collection is “a mix of body politics, motherhood, and feminine sexuality that showcases some of Mann’s published work and brand new essays.”
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-946604-52-1
This play “threads fantasy together with Connor’s past and present, creating a thriller in which there are Fake Dads and real daddies, surgery and blood play, childhood scarring and adulthood dissociation.”
Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir by Rajiv Mohabir
Restless Books | 2021
ISBN: 9781632062802
Mohabir’s memoir “navigates the fraught constellations of race, sexuality, and cultural heritage that have shaped his experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the United States.”
Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast by Neesha Powell-Ingabire
Hub City Press | 2024
ISBN: 9798885740388
In her debut memoir, Powell-Ingabire “chips away at coastal Georgia’s facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories.”
Trio House Press | 2026
ISBN: 9781949487701
This memoir “inspires with its account of this father and son, both battle-scarred survivors, and how they heal their relationship through the power of claiming and telling their own stories.”
IHRAM Press | 2023
ISBN: 979-8870935591
This anthology is “a powerful collection of stories, poems, and essays that respond to the global criminalization of LGBTQ+ individuals.”
Sacred Spells: Collected Works by Assotto Saint
Nightboat Books | 2023
ISBN: 9781643621562
This collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts “exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements worldwide.”
The Post Office: An Opera in Poems by Elaine Sexton
Grid Books | 2026
ISBN: 9781946830432
According to Blas Falconer, Sexton’s libretto “reimagines a one-room post office as a stage on which to confront some of the nation’s most urgent questions—about marriage, democracy, and the promise of equality.”
Dreams in Which I’m Almost Human by Hannah Soyer
Red Hen Press | 2026
ISBN: 9781636284743
According to Rebekah Taussig, this memoir “weaves together the personal and the political, dreams and nightmares, flesh and machine, the mermaid tail and the surgical scalpel, to tell a story that wonders and wanders.”
Read Furiously | 2026
ISBN: 9781960869258
This collection of essays “fuses a pop culture lens with Teets’s signature wit and charm to showcase her quiet rebellion against cultural cynicism.”
Weaving Liberation by M. K. Thekkumkattil
Abode Press | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9900598-8-7
This hybrid chapbook “offers an archive and genuflection to the communities that have come together for Palestinian liberation.”
Poetry
Spout Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-0-965944-32-8
Sweet Nothing “claims language, whether prayer, monologue, or poem, as our most prized of veils over the abyss, as the beauty that grows from sweet nothing.”
Sacred and Perishable by Carissa Natalia Baconguis
Nine Syllables Press | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9881649-2-0
This debut poetry chapbook “follows friends Dian, a medical student, and Carlos, a shapeshifter, as they challenge concepts of time, self, and the other.”
Something Involving A Mailbox! | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-955714-04-4
In these sixty poems, Barton “detonates the medium with trademark menace, swagger, charm, and humor, knotting a Möbius strip of fracturing perspective, appalling personae, and a curiously troubling precision.”
Sundress Publications | 2023
ISBN: 978-1951979546
Grief Slut “offers a portrait of a girl living through boyhood and grappling with the violence of nostalgia in poems that blend high art, archival slivers, and Taco Bell.”
they/she/he: ritual to forget your unbecoming by dezireé a. brown
Host Publications | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9905483-2-9
brown’s collection “maps the odyssey of a life lived in transition and serves as an archive of Black transmasc experience, of every burning crucible and every hard-won survival.”
the past is a jean jacket by Cloud Delfina Cardona
Hub City Press | 2025
ISBN: 9798885740593
The speaker of these poems “explores their gender through sex and relationships, searches for belonging in their family lineage, and copes with depression using movies, indie bands, cigarettes, and Tumblr.”
Alice James Books | 2026
ISBN: 9781949944778
According to Cathy Linh Che, Reverse Requiem “addresses the ghosts of history, which through language and tender attention, Cariño exhumes and brings to aliveness with sumptuous naming.”
Antediluvian by Kameryn Alexa Carter
University of Pittsburgh Press | 2026
ISBN: 9780822967675
The speaker of this collection “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.”
kiss & release by Anthony DiPietro
Unsolicited Press | 2026
ISBN: 978-1956692877
In this collection, DiPietro’s poetry “woos the Zodiac, tries to get its virginity back, invents sex as a religion, mythologizes masculinity and succumbs to its devils, kills a snake to resurrect a lover,” and more.
First Epistle to the Amphibians by Ricardo Domeneck
Translated from the Portuguese by Chris Daniels
World Poetry Books | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-954218-45-1
In this collection of selected poems—the first volume of Domeneck’s work to appear in English—Domeneck “constructs a hyperbolic spiral of artifice, rage, and tenderness.”
Sinister Wisdom | 2025
ISBN: 978-1944981815
Edited by SaraEllen Strongman, this collection of Parker’s works “introduces new audiences to Parker’s fire, passion, tenderness, and vision for the world.”
Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry
Green Linden Press | 2024
ISBN: 9781737162582
This anthology of work by one hundred poets—including Frank Bidart, Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, and more—showcases “four generations of living writers, as varied in their subjects and styles as the nation they represent.”
South Broadway Press | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-7350355-7-4
According to Stephanie Heit, this book “sparkles with the rug burn of hard-won lived experience of suicidality, medical gaslighting, and the daily work of staying alive.”
South Broadway Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781735035536
According to Marissa Forbes, Foote’s debut collection “weaves snapshots of what it’s like to be an educator who understands the rawness of their students’ experiences with snapshots of what it’s like to walk out of the school and into a world that’s both beautiful and terrifying.”
Abode Press | 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9900598-9-4
This chapbook of poems “questions what it means to live fully inside one’s own body in a society that seeks to regulate, define, or erase bodies.”
Rainproof Press | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9945143-0-6
This collection “speaks of a vast journey of the self, sweeping from the underworld to outer space and giving voice to the mysteries of memory and survival.”
Coachella Elegy by Christian Gullette
Trio House Press | 2024
ISBN: 9781949487220
This debut poetry collection “explores the queer promised lands and poolside utopias of the American West even as they are threatened by environmental destruction.”
Bottom Feeders by Arielle Hebert
Black Lawrence Press | 2026
ISBN: 9781625572196
In this collection set in late 2000s Florida, “overdoses, red tide blooms, and hurricanes are as much a part of growing up as fleeting teenage desires, beach parties, and prom.”
Locus of Control by Rebecca Herz
Prolific Pulse Press | 2026
ISBN: 978-1962374705
The poems in this collection weave “the clinical language of therapy with the raw emotional undercurrent that rarely makes it into the office.”
local remedies by Chiagoziem Jideofor
Host Publications | 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9905483-6-7
According to Sarah Lubala, in this collection “survival is not merely endurance—it is an ongoing, communal project of naming, tending, stitching, and returning.”
These Aren’t My Woods Anymore by Soon Jones
Poetose | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64672-365-2
Jones’s debut poetry collection “captures the experience of living as a mixed-race, queer, Asian American from the rural South.”
The Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelly
Graywolf Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-359-9
This poetry collection is an “ode to companionship with people, animals, and our planet, and reveals the reparative power of intimacy.”
Worth Burning by Mickie Kennedy
Black Lawrence Press | 2026
ISBN: 9781625571816
Worth Burning “traces a boy’s journey from a turbulent Southern childhood … through the AIDS crisis, a marriage of convenience, and finally, towards a rugged self-acceptance haunted by the past.”
Sad Man Happy Hour by Aileen Keown Vaux
Unsolicited Press | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-969421-00-6
This four-part collection rooted in the Pacific Northwest “aims to deconstruct queer alienation and our ever-changing relationship with the natural world.”
Ar:range:ments by Esther Kondo Heller
Fonograf Editions | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-964499-39-0
In this collection, “the action of arranging becomes a means of sounding out a collective utterance of Black survival with joy amidst grief, colonialism, medical racism, and loss.”
Lonely Women Make Good Lovers by Keetje Kuipers
Boa Editions | 2025
ISBN: 9781960145451
In this collection, “astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire.”
Tupelo Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-961209-10-7
“With a title utilizing the last two words Emily Dickinson wrote,” Called Back “converses with one of our greatest poets in theatrical monologue, poem after poem, decoding secrets amidst the blatant.”
Oleander Marriage by Eleanor Lerman
Mayapple Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-952781-29-2
The poems in Lerman’s eighth collection “ache with longing for days gone by; for the bond between mothers and daughters broken too soon; for nights spent in grim hotels; dawns clouded by lonely dreams.”
EVERYTHING IS IN SEARCH OF EQUILIBRIUM by eso malflor
Echo Thread Books | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-218-78709-7
This collection “acknowledges and offers compassion for bodies that have been subjected to conformity, instead giving them the agency to be whatever it is that time and self call them to be.”
The Center for Literary Publishing | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-885635-93-8
McCabe’s collection traverses “the Ice Age; the excavation of the oldest female body; ancient Los Angeles before humans; and, in Sweden (McCabe’s mother’s home country), the 377-million-year-old meteor-made Siljan lake.”
Barrow Street Press | 2016
ISBN: 9780997318401
According to Paisley Rekdal, in Detainee Murphy “teases out the theater, politics, pain, and, yes, erotics of cruelty, forcing us to recognize that love, at root, is a dirty game.”
Recovery Commands by Abby E. Murray
Ex Ophidia Press | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-218667-86-3
According to Kate Gaskin, in Recovery Commands Murray “dissects a long military marriage, asking what separates kindness from brutality and passivism from warmongering.”
book of provocations by mónica teresa ortiz
Host Publications | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7376050-6-5
Ortiz’s poems “explore catastrophe, illustrating in verse the refusal of the human spirit to submit to systems of oppression.”
Two Minutes of Light by Nancy K. Pearson
Perugia Press | 2008
ISBN: 9780979458217
In this collection, “the foil to self-destruction is art itself—finding small beauty in unlikely places and transforming it into poetry.”
Grid Books | 2025
ISBN: 9781946830395
This novella-in-verse “tells the story of the author’s coming out as bisexual, as related through meditations on the work of Sargent, whom several scholars now think may well have been gay, though closeted.”
D A N G E R O U S B O D I E S / A N G E R O D E S by stevie redwood
Sundress Publications | 2024
ISBN: 978-1951979638
This collection asks, “Can we find and reach and move and be in conversation with / be moved by people who also aim to destroy the worlds that aim to destroy us? Do we know us?”
Wayward Creatures by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
Host Publications | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7376050-8-9
In this collection, “the colonizer’s language has been overgrown by an ecology of strangeness and possibility—poetry disrupts, rituals, and revolts, rendering queer abolition irresistible.”
Algarabía: The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of the Isle Alarabíyya by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
Graywolf Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-351-3
Algarabía is “an epic poem that follows the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf.”
Arrowsmith Press | 2026
ISBN: 979-8990405080
These poems by a longtime classical music critic “move fluidly between the rooms of memory and the rooms we live in, between wry horror, elegy, and celebration.”
Mother, Daughter, Augur by Mary Simmons
June Road Press | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9874328-7-7
This debut collection “brings together found elements from nature, folklore, mythology, ballet, and oral tradition, crafting a strange, kaleidoscopic beauty and complicating inherited definitions of femininity.”
Nightboat Books | 2026
ISBN: 9781643623078
In these poems, smith “charts medical transition, a budding Islamic practice, and civic resistance, felt in the book’s themes of meaning-making, hope, love, lust, identity, and community alongside personal, regional, and global grief.”
Intimacies in Borrowed Light by Darius Stewart
EastOver Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-958094-01-3
According to Donika Kelly, Stewart’s collection “thrums with ecstasy and extravagance even as his speaker charts the vagaries of the body, the inevitability of grieving and loss.”
Finding the Bear by Gail Thomas
Perugia Press | 1997
ISBN: 9780966045901
These poems “showcase deep caring, a celebration of life and sensuality, and observation of the natural and political world.”
Sand Bodied Florida Boy by Grayson Thompson
Foglifter | 2025
ISBN: 979-8989286447
Thompson’s collection is “a love song to the first moment you felt believed in, when hope wasn’t a question, but an answer in every breath you chose to take.”
Translating Blue by Sherre Vernon
Poetose | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64672-363-8
Vernon’s collection “considers how even in a lifetime of challenge and heartbreak one can find something beautiful in this life.”
Person, Perceived Girl by A. A. Vincent
Barrow Street Press | 2022
ISBN: 9781736607541
According to Randy James, Vincent’s voice “is youthful and wise in its lyrical examination of what it means to exist as ( )—to be simultaneously inside and outside the circles that define our living.”
Saint Consequence by Michael M. Weinstein
Alice James Books | 2025
ISBN: 9781949944747
According to Katie Peterson, this poetry collection is a “book of 21st century transits—out of an iconic American childhood, towards the culture and language of Russia, out of one gender and into another.”
Literary Magazines
“Doppel Doppel Gang Gang” by Phoenix Alexander
Baffling Magazine | 2025
This story begins, “‘Okay, we’re filming. Ready everyone? From the top: hand, hand, shoulder, shoulder, body pop left and-a body-pop right and—Vinny? Where the hell have you been?!’”
beestung | 2024
The poem “The Love Museum Is Offering Free Admission,” begins, “plus a 20% discount at the gift shop for anyone / on the precipice of heartbreak. I’ve been / meaning to go for over a year…”
“The Exorsister” by Nic Anstett
One Story | 2023
Anstett’s short story is published in Issue 304 of One Story.
ANMLY | 2026
The poem “Dear Sohraab” begins, “Right before the girlfriend of the politician / ’s son dragged you away from me, you said, ‘Aapke watan se kisiko mil ke kaafi achha laga.’”
“The Smell of Her” by Dana Baylous
Wellspringwords | 2025
This essay begins, “She says good morning and I hear I miss you. She says I’m busy and I hear I’m practicing how not to say your name.”
“A text message to a New York Navajo” by June Beck
ALOCASIA | 2025
This poem begins, “The ancestors are always with you, / even when you’re smoking weed / in Central Park. / Greet them with every sunrise…”
Becoming: Voices on Gender and Queerness
IHRAM Press Literary Magazine | 2026
This issue featuring thirteen written works “captures the vulnerability and lyricism found in every expression of identity, along with the authentic emotions and experiences that accompany it.”
Three Poems by Alexandra Burack
Philly Chapbook Review | 2025
The poem “To Know Blue from the Color of Snow at Dusk” begins, “Moonless, I walk through a scorching / city where all that matters is the day’s / singularity.”
The Panacea Review | 2025
Chang’s poems “LOTOS-EATERS,” “PSALM FOR ARRIVAL,” “KNIGHT OF THE SORROWFUL COUNTENANCE,” “WOODBURY COMMONS,” “FORGERIES,” and “BRAT AUTUMN” are published in Issue 2 of The Panacea Review.
“me, my assigned agent, and our beef” by Cianga
New England Review | 2025
This poem begins, “US Citizenship and Immigration Services office / pierre opens my file / like i search my fridge / there’s nothing new to see / we’re just in limbo…”
“One More Question” by Tricia De Souza
Callaloo | 2025
This essay begins, “The photos, slightly weathered and yellowed by the passage of time, still retain a striking clarity. If I bring them close and stare long enough, I can almost convince myself I am the person behind the camera.”
“Within/Without.” by Ka’Dia Dhatnubia
Wellspringwords | 2025
This poem begins, “I’m sitting on the couch, sipping a Sprite between two naked women. They pass a blunt back and forth across my lap, as if I’m simply part of the furniture.”
The Cincinnati Review | 2026
This poem begins, “If after / a bad night I need someone to blame, there are so many candidates. Streetlights. My left knee.”
“Queer Belonging and Ukraine” by Sasha Dovzhyk
Arrowsmith Journal | 2026
This essay begins, “With curiosity and respect, I watch my fellow citizens observe their national traditions similarly to how I watch heteronormative families perform their familial rites.”
“constructions” by Heather Emmanuel
Does It Have Pockets | 2026
This story begins, “The leather jacket has a tear in it when she first meets Josie. It’s an old thing, bought from a street vendor in Porto with loose change rather than a bank note.”
“Making a Monster: A Craft Essay” by CD Eskilson
The Cincinnati Review | 2025
This essay begins, “What do we mean when we call something a monster? The word itself is likely to have come into English through the Latin word monstrare, meaning ‘to demonstrate.’”
“我长大的我想开心 (when i grow up, i want to be happy)” by kieran fu
seedfall | 2026
fu’s work is published in seedfall volume two: Emergence.
“To the Couple I Watched On My Middle School Commute” by Naomi Gordon-Loebl
Off Assignment | 2026
This essay begins, “Seventh grade was not a good year. I suspect it isn’t for most people, though each in our own way—Tolstoy might as well have been writing about middle schoolers, not families…”
“A Language Made of Light” by Daniel Goulden
Oyster River Pages | 2024
This story begins, “I didn’t care much when an angel landed on the hill outside of our village. It was the early days of the world back then, when things were new and fragile like morning dew…”
“Four of Cups” by Hannah Gregory
The Sun | 2026
This story begins, “You watch a woman across the bar fiddle with a lime slice in her drink. She pops the lime in her mouth, peel and all, and her face snaps from boredom to…”
Dark Matter: Women Witnessing | 2025
The poem “With Her I Never Feared Darkness” begins, “In the dark she knew me by touch alone / mapping me in a language that didn’t need sound.”
Off Assignment | 2026
This essay begins, “All the places I have known seem to collide at night, Valera. And here I am, in darkness, my thoughts eddying beneath the pooling light of a desk lamp.”
“Can the Sireniform Speak?: Devolving with The Little Mermaid” by Sophie Lewis
The Drift | 2023
This essay begins, “In the year that brought us the orca uprising and the disappearance of a submarine carrying tourists to the wreck of the Titanic, Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid starred an African American woman.”
Sinister Wisdom | 2024
This issue “pays tribute to the iconic lesbian journal Common Lives / Lesbian Lives that published fifty-six issues between 1980 and 1994.”
“How I Came to Be Possessed By The Ghost of Tallulah Bankhead” by JA Logwood
Baffling Magazine | 2026
This story begins, “‘The first rule of sapphic ghost portals is they’re only accessible during rainstorms,’ Dani says, turning off Sunset and into the McDonald’s parking lot.”
“Pride is Still a Riot” by CD Mangal
seedfall | 2026
Mangal’s work is published in seedfall volume two: Emergence.
“in conversation with orchids” by j marvain
ALOCASIA | 2025
This poem begins, “i keep running fingertips / along the sunflower of my skin / like a path, / or an exit / forgive me if ever i follow the stem / tracing lines to exhale–”
“Bloodstream” by Dafydd McVeigh
Oyster River Pages | 2025
This story begins, “Diego was dating an older guy who had a car and everything. I rode in the back like a kid, the two of them up front like my parents.”
“The First Winter” by Joshua Merchant
Callaloo | 2026
This poem begins, “my tongue sleighs / down the slope of / a coors lite. I am / five years old and my / grandmother has something to prove. / Ugh, this taste like nasty soda!”
“Ignoring the Blood on My Pillow, I Listen to Debussy” by Rita Mookerjee
Half Mystic Journal | 2025
Mookerjee’s poem is published in Opus II, Issue II: Sevdah of Half Mystic Journal.
“We Convenient Scapegoats” by Sylvi Morgan
Collateral | 2026
This poem begins, “We marched through deserts without complaint. / We volunteered to do it again, despite the fragments we left behind. / We chiseled our hearts upon those sands.”
“Miss Girl Who Couldn’t 1997” by T. L. Pavlich
The Offing | 2020
This essay begins, “When I was a little girl, before I became Théodore Lucas, I entered my first and only beauty pageant.”
Two Poems by Christopher Phelps
Does It Have Pockets | 2026
The poem “Axiomancy” begins, “Some sort of fanciful word that came to me as I walked in the woods with my companion. My house-dweller and I, out for a spell.”
Epistemic Literary | 2024
This poem begins, “Maybe I didn’t ask / but sitting in the shadow of summer / makes me wonder / if asking isn’t always.”
Making Waves Review | 2026
This special issue featuring poetry, fiction, micro fiction, memoir, essays, and visual art “isn’t only for those rejoicing in the queer experience; it’s also for those who continue to feel like they must hide their own identity.”
Shō Poetry Journal | 2026
This playlist features audio recordings by poets recently published in Shō Poetry Journal, including Chen Chen, Reuben Gelley-Newman, Saúl Hernández, Sara Hovda, and more.
Silly Goose Press | 2025
This mini issue features poetry by Steven C. Wright and nat raum, fiction by Adam McOmber and Georgia Lowe, nonfiction by J. S. Harrison and Dreama Weaver, and more.
“Pomegranate Seed” by Lo Riddell
Poetose | 2025
This poem begins, “When I enter the kitchen / on Wednesdays, I find them / there, at the counter…”
“Nuala” by Daniel Lanza Rivers
Tahoma Literary Review | 2026
This essay begins, “Nuala was eleven years old when she killed her first two birds. They were chickadees, small and round and colorful.”
Two Poems by Christopher Leigh Silverberg
ANMLY | 2026
The poem “The Poet-Hearted King of the Jets Unprophesies His Perfect Lover Upon Lifting Her Veil And Finding No Skin, or, American History, from the 2004 Democratic National Convention to the Day of Barack Obama’s Inauguration” begins, “America don’t know it yet but that stranger / from the other side of the city will come / to be the love of your life…”
West Trestle Review | 2026
This poem begins, “My daughter finds the perfect spiral / of a snail shell and bids me / put it in my pocket / for safekeeping, but…”
“MY BROTHER LECTURES ME ABOUT GAUGUIN” by Sumitra Singam
Epistemic Literary | 2025
This poem begins, “He says, ‘Art is in the eye of the beholder.’ / I say, ‘So you want to behold a naked fourteen-year-old Javanese girl…”
“Become What You Are” by Willow Sipling
beestung | 2026
This poem begins, “Sharing my little, teal hormone tablets / with the trans girl who spent the night / was a communion infinitely more holy…”
“Taxodium distichum (bald cypress tree)” by Lee Summers
Faoileánach Journal | 2025
This poem begins, “Roots are the ropes we tie to / Sand, if even to keep a slice / Of a feathered pillow of / Leaves above the biting tide…”
“Against Queer Presentism: How the Book World Neglects the Archive” by Colton Valentine
The Drift | 2022
This essay begins, “History is a nightmare from which the queers have awoken. Or so it would seem in Elif Batuman’s Either/Or (2022).”
Anodyne Magazine | 2026
Volume 7 of Anodyne Magazine features writing by Kay Kassirer, Kath Healing, Jordan Prochnow, Heidi Spitzig, and more.
Foglifter | 2026
Volume 11, Issue 1 of Foglifter features fiction by M. Sun, poetry by m. mick powell and Gaia Rajan, creative nonfiction by Magenta Naaku, and more.
Philly Chapbook Review | 2026
This poem begins, “What is a graveyard / but a garden of corpses? / What is a garden / but a graveyard / of flowers?”
“My Bowstring Heart” by Rose Whitmore
The Sun | 2026
This essay begins, “I’m playing rugby in rural Pennsylvania when I dislocate my elbow and get taken to an ER in Pittsburgh.”
