Stories can be a light in the darkness. If you’re looking for a bit of light right now, visit your local indie bookstore or library and get your hands on something new (or new to you). Check out this roundup of new Southern releases for this month!
No More Worlds to Conquer:
The Black Poet in Washington, DC
By Brian Gilmore
February 2, 2026
Georgetown University Press: “Washington, DC, has long been home to a dynamic and vibrant African American literary community, despite often being overshadowed by the literary worlds of New York and Chicago. In No More Worlds to Conquer, the local poet Brian Gilmore uncovers the buried legacy of Black poets in Washington.”
Good People
By Patmeena Sabit
February 3, 2026
Random House: “Told through multiple points of view and set against a backdrop of Islamophobia and xenophobia, the novel is riveting, provocative, and unforgettable. Good People is sure to spark ongoing conversation with its urgent storytelling, daring structure, and nuanced look at some of the most pressing questions of our time.”
Superfan
By Jenny Tinghui Zhang
February 3, 2026
Flatiron: “Dazzling, entrancing, and deeply heartfelt, Superfan is about fandom in all its magic and terror, and the extreme lengths to which we go to rid ourselves of loneliness.”
black frag/ments
By Lolita Stewart-White
February 3, 2026
Hub City: ” Stewart-White expertly weaves ancestral and present voices together, resulting in an intergenerational archive that centers one family’s challenging journey in a broader context of how Black people protest, repair, and revive.”
Steeplechase
By Angela Ball
February 10, 2026
University of Pittsburgh: “Steeplechase explores multiple landscapes, including Mississippi and its many church steeples; countries known and unknown; cities and inhabitants both aspirational and lost. Its voice is humorous, bewildered, disillusioned, hopeful. The book’s temporal setting is the two years of extra life granted a partner after catastrophic illness and surgery: love’s last compelling season.”
I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For
By Bsrat Mezghebe
February 10, 2026
Liveright: “A loving ode to an immigrant community on the cusp of a new age, I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For boldly asks: How does our past define our present? And what stories must we let go of to be truly free?”
Where the Wildflowers Grow
By Terah Shelton Harris
February 17, 2026
Sourcebooks Landmark: “From acclaimed author Terah Shelton Harris comes a poignant story of survival and redemption, asking readers to question what it means to stop surviving and start living… Leigh finds peace with the hard pace and soft nature of the farm, taking comfort in the life blooming around her. Maybe she’s not beyond redemption, not too broken for something good. And maybe, just maybe, Leigh starts to heal.”
Dear Second Husband
By Susan Finch
February 19, 2026
Carnegie-Mellon University Press: “Set in the rapidly changing city of Nashville, Tennessee, the characters in Dear Second Husband struggle to make their marriages, friendships, and families thrive despite the pressures of modern life. An unapologetic widower, a self-destructive musician, a teacher grieving a miscarriage, and a mother trying to be everything for everyone rely on resilience and persistence to find joy and belonging in the fragile connections between one another.”
Cameo Blue
By Carolyn Guinzio
February 19, 2026
Carnegie-Mellon Univesrity Press: “Cameo Blue is a spiritual topography, recording the traces of people in their environments, natural and otherwise, and the portents, memories, and signs they use to navigate their path or understand the precipices they face. Lush with color, weather, and imagery, some poems are driven by breathless conjecture, or propelled by the acute observation that often comes with shock, when time stands still and a camera flash reveals the gap between external and internal, hope and fear, past and future.”
Worth Burning
By Mickie Kennedy
February 24, 2026
Black Lawrence: “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. Through searing confession and stark image-making, Kennedy excavates the contours of a life that persistently bends, against all odds, toward a ramshackle wholeness. Suffused with efficient, image-rich narrative poems, Kennedy’s debut is at once sweeping and intimate, like a love note passed in secret.”
The Irish Goodbye
Beth Ann Fennelly
February 24, 2026
W.W. Norton: “In The Irish Goodbye, Beth Ann Fennelly writes of the small moments that shape a life, whether moving or perplexing or troubling or gladdening, in the process dignifying the diminutive through the act of attention. Fennelly explores her roles as a friend, wife, mother, and daughter, documenting a brush with an old flame or the devastating death of her sister in crystalline, precise sentences.”
Brawler
By Lauren Groff
February 24, 2026
Riverhead Books: “Precise, surprising, and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated, sometimes heartbreaking turning points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and what it takes to survive.”
Blood Relay
By Devon Mihesuah
February 24, 2026
Bantam: “In this richly layered debut thriller reminiscent of the real issue of missing and murdered Indigenous people, a badass Choctaw detective discovers an insidious plot against her reservation while investigating the disappearance of a beloved champion athlete.”
Kin
By Tayari Jones
February 24, 2026
Knopf: “A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.”
The Invisible Years
By Rodrigo Hasbún
Translated by Lily Meyer
February 24, 2026
Deep Vellum: “A writer unhappy in his career and his marriage, Julián has been novelizing the past for his next book, trying to make meaning out of the events that changed the course of their lives forever. “I’d thought that writing about that time would free me, relieve the burden of the invisible years,” he writes, “but often it seems that it’s done the reverse.” Juxtaposing the naïve invincibility of adolescence with the grasping uncertainties of adulthood, The Invisible Years deftly weaves a coming-of-age tale that leaves the reader hanging on every word, even as they know how the cards fall in the end.”
Southern Review of Books 