Black Lawrence Press

A low-income Baltimore neighborhood is targeted for a controversial urban renewal project-- an amusement park in the theme of Baltimore itself-- that forces its residents to reckon with racism, displacement, and their futures. Peter Cryer is a queer teenager who fantasizes about leaving Baltimore...

A finalist for the Fall 2019 Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition, the Cupboard Pamphlet's 2020 Annual Contest, and the 2021 Newfound Prose Prize.Inspired by Virgie Townsend's own experiences growing up in an independent fundamental Baptist church, the seven stories in BECAUSE WE...

Fiction. Sharply strange and eerily familiar. Absurdly funny and terrifyingly serious. Surreal, fantastic, gritty, real. The stories in Matthew Cheney's Hudson Prize-winning debut collection range across various styles, modes, genres, and tones as they explore the worlds of family, love, memory, and loss. BLOOD:...

Through intertwined threads of autofiction, lyric science writing, and the tale of a newly queer Hawaiian volcano, Sabrina Imbler delivers a coming out story on a geological time scale. This is a small book that tackles large, wholly human questions-what it means to live...

Wandering from Detroit to Haifa, Tripoli to Brooklyn, the poems of FOUR CITIES reveal the underbelly of cities, bearing witness to narratives of love, occupation and faith. These testimonies are harvested from displaced landscapes, histories and languages, revealing the unsettled lives of immigrants. Using...

The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz's debut collection, Here in the Night, are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced. With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with...

From an Italian word meaning " to repent," a pentimento is an instance in painting when traces of an artist's earlier decisions or mistakes are visible through the final layer(s) of paint. Using modes of confession, ekphrasis, and biblical persona, Pentimento excavates a queerness...

ABOUTIndebted to the docupoetics tradition, Raena Shirali's summonings investigates the ongoing practice of witch ("daayan") hunting in India. Here, poems interrogate the political implications & shortcomings of writing Subaltern personae while acknowledging the author's Westernized positionality. Continuing to explore multi-national and intersectional concerns around...

A searing portrait of survival, Worth Burning traces a boy's journey from a turbulent Southern childhood--marked by parental abuse, death, and hidden queerness--through the AIDS crisis, a marriage of convenience, and finally, towards a rugged self-acceptance haunted by the past. Worth Burning crackles with...