It's official—our Fall 2025 - Spring 2026 titles include wayward creatures by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, Praisesong for the People: Poems for Everyday Texans edited by Amanda Johnston, they/she/he: ritual to forget your unbecoming by dezireé a. brown, The Hungering Years by Summer Farah, and local remedies by Chiagoziem Jideofor!
It's difficult to express how honored we feel to publish these works, and how surreal it feels to get the opportunity to work with such a fiercely talented and thoughtful group of poets. In our stargazing visions of the future, working with these kinds of poets was our highest aspiration. Below, you'll find the juicy deets about each book, and get an introduction to each author in our publishing lineup. Just know this: these books will supercharge your soul, and affirm that there is breathtaking and vital poetry being written and shared in the world. We can't wait to share them with you.
✦ This August, we are thrilled to publish wayward creatures by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes! wayward creatures offers poems as portals into the fugitive magic of brown, crip, trans, neuroqueer intimacies, inviting us to decolonize the way we make meaning through language, and to wild toward monstrously vibrant becomings.
✦ heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, brown/Colombian, crip/disabled, writer, scholar, artist, cultural worker and professor in feminist, queer, and disability studies. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), the chapbook, Ephemeral (EcoTheo Collective 2024), and the forthcoming, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2025.) They are editor/curator of the Anomalous Press column, Wild-Wired: Neuroqueer and Neurodivergent Poetics and their poetry and non-fiction have been published in American Poetry Review, the Normal School, Poetry Magazine, and other places. They currently live in California.
✦ Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston's latest digital project Praisesong for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas will be yours to hold and treasure this September! The collection will include Texas poets from throughout the seven regions of our beloved home state and celebrates the everyday Texan!
✦ Amanda Johnston is a writer, visual artist, Texas Poet Laureate, and founder/executive director of Torch Literary Arts.
✦ We are honored to announce the 2025 winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize, they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becomingby dezireé a. brown! Headed to your bookshelf in November, this debut collection explores origin stories—of trauma, identities, evolving queerness—with utmost tenderness, influenced by the world of video games, creating space for new stories of self to exist, change shape, and ultimately, heal.
✦ dezireé a. brown (they/he) is a Black queer nonbinary Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, interdisciplinary scholar, and sjw, born and raised in Flint, MI. Their debut collection of poetry, they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming, is the winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize and forthcoming in Fall 2025 from Host Publications. They are the winner of the Betty Stuart Smith Award from the University of Illinois Chicago, where they recently received their PhD in English with concentrations in Black Studies and Gender & Women's Studies. He received an MFA from Northern Michigan University and he was a Quarterfinalist in the 5th Annual Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship, often claiming to have been born with a poem written across his chest. He spends much of his free time gaming and he plays a mean hand of spades. They recently served as the 2024 Editor-in-Chief at The Seventh Wave Magazine to curate a folio of creative writing and art focused on the video game genre, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter Journal, wildness, Scalawag, Four Way Review, Obsidian, and the anthology A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry from the Edges of Liberation and Living, among others.
✦ Next February, we are publishing Summer Farah's debut collection, The Hungering Years. The poems explore friendship, deep longing, and the complexities of place with a timbre both contemplative and playful, anchored by a kinship with artists such as Mitski and Etel Adnan, as Farah creates new homes from the spaces left by diaspora.
✦ Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer, editor, and zine-maker from California. Her chapbook, I could die today and live again (Game Over Books, 2024) explores a childhood corrupted by empire, inspired by The Legend of Zelda. Summer is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and the National Book Critics Circle. The Hungering Years is her debut full-length collection. She is calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.
✦ Next Spring, we have the honor of publishing Chiagoziem Jideofor's local remedies. This debut collection draws from Jideofor's experience as a queer, Igbo Nigerian living in the United States and considers the intricate entanglement of inheritance and selfhood. Through meditative language, these poems show great tenderness and care, even as they confront genocide and war, even as they are shaped by hardship.
✦ Chiagoziem Jideofor is Queer and Igbo. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in POETRY, Michigan Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, I Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poetry, South Carolina Review, berlin lit, The Lincoln Review, Passages North, Commonwealth's ADDA, the minnesota review, Sho Poetry Journal, The Indianapolis Review, Cola Literary Review, Consequence Forum, Obsidian, and so on. Agoziem is also a Best of the Net and Best Spiritual Literature nominee.