Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
Drawn from the experience of growing up in poverty in a single-parent home and escaping to the city at the age of sixteen, these poems look at the physical and emotional implications of trauma but also reveal how being bisexual and disabled can be sources of resilience, joy, and creativity.
Examining the way sexism and sexual violence exist as a spectre throughout the lives of women and girls, Gold Star also contemplates issues of child abuse and neglect, reproductive health, and the complex decision to be child-free. Never shying away from the weight of its vital subject matter, this is an urgent and unflinching feminist exploration of embodiment.
Patient, Female: Stories by Julie Schumacher
An unsuspecting couple is treated to a luxury vacation by their deceased neighbor. After begrudgingly agreeing to volunteer at a nursing home, a middle school girl gambles over games of bridge with elderly residents. A single mother struggles to understand the unique bond between her autistic son and his dying grandmother. Four friends experience decades of highs and lows as pawns in The Game of Life. A professional gynecology patient runs into a high school flame while at work, undressed, on the job.
In this irreverent collection, celebrated novelist Julie Schumacher balances sorrow against laughter. Here, we experience story not only as narrative, but as syllabus and as board game. Each protagonist—ranging from girlhood to senescence—receives her own indelible voice as she navigates social blunders, generational misunderstandings, and the absurdity of the human experience. Exquisitely honest and expertly crafted, Patient, Female renders—with dark humor and wit—the foibles of human behavior and our endearing imperfections.
It’s a prose poetry collection about gender, technology, and the emotional textures of online life—group chats, doomscrolling, queer identity formation, and the strange tenderness of digital community under pressure.
VAGABOND CITY 