Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
You Could Be That Kind of Girl: stories by Téa Franco
Frida Kahlo resurrects as a social media influencer, a girl feeds all of her food to a bloom of angry ladybugs, a skunk funeral makes a young woman contemplate her life and more in Téa Franco’s You Could Be That Kind of Girl. Through a series of coming-of-age stories, this collection explores family dynamics, race, and sexuality, creating an intersectional portrait of the female experience navigating the patriarchal expectations they face from before they are born to long after they die. The characters that populate Franco’s collection have unique perspectives, often centering pop culture, and their stories show their strengths and their flaws as they attempt, and often fail, to decode the ever-changing rules they’ve been assigned.
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
In this debut by author stevie redwood, there is love—an abundance of love. And there is rage and dialectics and all we are capable of—all of it: the beauty and terror and generosity and dispossession and violence and collectivity and survival and deathmaking and interdependence and warfare—as beings living and dying on this earth in whatever place and time and context we’re in, for however long we’re here. It is a study and exploration of putative opposites that are in fact deeply co-constitutive and in mutable laminate relationship with each other. Here, in redwood’s hands, we see our capacity and attention and choices. Maybe too, there is hope that we might resist annihilation; we might wage life against capital.
What’s So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway? by Maya Williams
In Maya Williams’ What’s So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway? we witness a range of emotions after a loss of a family member that are grounded in faith, life, and family. Williams writes in the titular poem: “I want my pity party to be accessible as fuck, because we all have something to express pity about. We all have something to grieve about.” There is no actual pity in the poems, but rather, a tender mercy and a reverant strength in Williams’ lines that act as gentle reminders that language is wake work.
VAGABOND CITY 