Results by title

Danzirly is a striking bilingual poetry collection that fiercely examines the nuances of the American Dream for Latinx people in the United States. With a backdrop of stringent immigration policies, the #MeToo movement, and the increasingly tangible threat of climate change, this collection considers multigenerational Latinx identities in a rapidly changing country and world. Through the author’s Colombian American lens, the poems explore the intersections of culture, gender, history, and intergenerational grief.

Danzirly does not shy away from confronting traditional gender roles, religion, and anxieties surrounding climate change and the digital age. Gloria Muñoz addresses Latinx stereotypes and powerfully dismantles them in poetic form, juxtaposing the promised wonders of a life in America with the harsh realities that immigrants face as they build their lives and raise their families here. Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, this collection of poems is an unforgettable reckoning of the grief and beauty that pulses through twenty-first-century America.

Words have meaning and meaning evolves over time. In Perfect Dirt, Keegan Lester drags us through his failure to grasp the meaning that always seems to be just beyond his fingertips. These lyrical vignettes depict a lifelong search for home, identity, and the language to say the things we wish we could tell people in the moment.

Born in Southern California to parents who had migrated from West Virginia and South Florida, Lester spent summers with his grandparents in Morgantown, which instilled a deep anchor of place that continued to call to him, an Appalachian at heart even while living in New York City as a poet. As small successes started to come his way—a book and numerous tours—so did crises. Lester’s father, meanwhile, experiencing his own life crisis, embarked on a journey to sail the Caribbean. Both end up lost.

Part memoir, part tour diary, part homage to the places and people who have made him who he is, Perfect Dirt digs into the sometimes painful, sometimes jubilant questions of identity and success. This is a book searching to better understand the world and our place in it, the family we’re born into, and the family we make along the way.

2023 John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA)

2023 Honorable Mention, Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA)

2024 MPCA/ACA Best Single Work by One or More Authors, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association (MPCA/ACA)

A celebration of the distinctive and politically defiant art of Black queer, cis-, and transfemmes, from the work of Janelle Monáe and Janet Mock to that of Indya Moore and Kelsey Lu.

The Color Pynk is a passionate exploration of Black femme poetics of survival. Sidelined by liberal feminists and invisible to mainstream civil rights movements, Black femmes spent the Trump years doing what they so often do best: creating politically engaged art, entertainment, and ideas. In the first full-length study of Black queer, cis-, and trans-femininity, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley argues that this creative work offers a distinctive challenge to power structures that limit how we color, gender, and explore freedom.

Tinsley engages 2017–2020 Black femme cultural production that colorfully and provocatively imagines freedom in the stark white face of its impossibility. Looking to the music of Janelle Monáe and Kelsey Lu, Janet Mock’s writing for the television show Pose, the fashion of Indya Moore and (F)empower, and the films of Tourmaline and Juliana Huxtable, as well as poetry and novels, The Color Pynk conceptualizes Black femme as a set of consciously, continually rescripted cultural and aesthetic practices that disrupts conventional meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. There is an exuberant defiance in queer Black femininity, Tinsley finds—so that Black femmes continue to love themselves wildly in a world that resists their joy.

Vesna Pavlović: Stagecraft features four extensive bodies of the photographer's work, spanning from the early 2000s to today—photographs of the Yugoslav socialist modernist hotel spaces from her internationally recognized series "Hotels"; photographs of the ceremonial space of the Yugoslav Presidential Palace in Belgrade from the series "Collection/Kolekcija" and the recent "Fabrics of Socialism" and "Sites of Memory" series exploring the archives of the Museum of Yugoslav History.

The book includes critical essays that contextualize and expound on Pavlović's unique treatment of the photographic medium, in which a photographic moment is expanded to include the conditions of image making, production, documentation, and representation.