they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown

Winner of the 2025 Joe W. Bratcher Prize

they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown is a momentous debut, tracking a self-proclaimed antihero’s quest for liberation via the transformative ritual of writing through the past, present, and future. Influenced by video game worlds, choose-your-own adventures, and a multifaceted collective of Mesopotamian goddesses, this collection is a conjuring of selves encountered through gender who arise to meet one another in all their Black queer joy and rage. 

Communing with an ancestry of writers, healers, and found family, 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. “NO SPECTATORS ALLOWED” they/she/he asserts, insisting on our implication in this narrative, inviting us to traverse the intricate worlds crafted through its experimental poetic forms.

From the lunar shadows of this history of (un)becoming, poems bloom with epic blossoms, offering a potion that restores life. brown’s is an ecopoetics that looks to both the ocean’s depths and the expanses between stars for new methods of reclamation.  As Steven Dunn writes in his introduction, if you “engage with this book with an open heart and throat” you will be changed by “all its beauty, ugly, rage, transformation, and necessary self-empowerment.” This book is a collection of healing spells. It is a hand reaching out to you in the dark. 

With an introduction by writer and professor Steven Dunn.

dezireé a. brown (they/he) is a Black queer nonbinary Pushcart Prize–nominated poet, interdisciplinary scholar, and sjw, born and raised in Flint, MI. 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. 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, 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. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African & African American Studies at Earlham College. Often claiming to have been born with a poem written across his chest, he spends much of his free time gaming and plays a mean hand of spades. 

✦ Select Online Publications ✦

✦ Foglifter Vol. 9, Issue I, “short film with the raw heads of potatoes”

✦ Scalawag, “etymology of flight — a venn diagram"

✦ Four Way Review, “I Love What My Eyes Have Laid Sight On”; “reverse supper.”;

“Almost Every Book of Poetry Has a Poem about Horses”

✦ Rough Cut Press, Issue 63, “Dez: Choose Your Own Adventure”

The Official they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming Playlist

120 pages
ISBN: 979-8-9905483-2-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025938555
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