I can’t believe that it’s almost the end of Pride month! I hope you’ve all spent time finding joy and community and fighting for a better world. If you’re hoping to add something to your Pride month activities (that doesn’t require glitter or sweating outside), check out this non-exhaustive list of queer Southern books published in the first half of the year.
I Don’t Wish You Well
By Jumata Emill
January 20, 2026
Delacorte Press: “Five years ago, the infamous Trojan murders turned the small town of Moss Pointe, Louisiana into a living nightmare. Four teen boys—all star players on Moss Pointe High’s football team — were murdered one after the other by a Trojan-mask wearing killer. Eighteen-year-old Pryce Cummings is pretty sure he just stumbled upon evidence that throws the killer’s guilt into question. It’s the perfect story for his own podcast, and a reason to go back to the hometown he’s avoided since coming to terms with his sexuality while at college. But in Moss Pointe, digging into the past is anything but welcome. There’s so much more to what happened there five years ago, and Pryce is ready to crack it all wide open… if he lives to tell the tale.”
Blue Land
By CD Collins
January 27, 2026
University Press of Kentucky: “Blue Land offers twenty stories interwoven with complicated characters who struggle with loved ones, the dangers of longing, and the lure of addiction. This collection is a haunting work of Kentucky literature that probes southern and Appalachian life, sexual abuse, the nature of belonging, queer identity, and the environment. Collins’s stories offer embodied histories of the state, shattering preconceived notions and effectively rendering characters whose voices are sometimes lost in a dismissive, uncomprehending world. But Blue Land is not just for those with generational roots in the region — it is for those who have just arrived, those who left long ago, and those willing to listen.”
Worth Burning
By Mickie Kennedy
February 24, 2026
Black Lawrence Press: “An unflinching 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.”
Tore All to Pieces
By Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
March 17, 2026
University Press of Kentucky: “Tore All to Pieces is a fragmented novel that delves into the lives of Appalachian characters with similar struggles, backgrounds, and experiences and examines how people are often lonely despite these connections. Each narrative, presented in the form of a poem or short story, bends and weaves like the roads of Appalachia. Each character’s voice is richly portrayed in gripping and lyrical language, uniting the stories in a quest for truth, genuine understanding, and respect.”
Entered Some Aliens
By Siew Hii
March 24, 2026
University of Wisconsin Press: “‘There is no version of this wherein I am given the time machine and do not destroy it,’ writes Siew Hii in this wide-ranging collection that offers a poet’s perspective on what it means to be a queer Asian American in the American South. Exuding wit and profound insight, Hii’s is a voice that can elicit both laughter and sober reflection within the space of a few lines. In an explosion of different styles and formats, she delivers precise, cutting observations about self, family, and strangers.”
Yellow
By Amy Pence
March 31, 2026
Red Hen Press: “It’s 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence with this magical creature — until an incident with a serial killer at the lake disrupts their connection. Both mystifying and metaphorical, Yellow becomes a guiding force for her brother Clem, a New Orleans seeker. As years pass, Z tries to recover what life has taught her to forget. A multi-threaded novel, Yellow weaves fact, physics, space exploration, and philosophy to create a transcendent reading experience.”
I’ll Take My Body To-Go
By Kindall Fredricks
April 7, 2026
University of Akron Press: “With brazen reverence, Fredricks does not shy from illuminating the trauma of their lived experiences, which are a rejection of the wax-paper world of girlhood that is so often portrayed — together, they flick the ashes of amen to the dirt, shoplift cheap wine from gas stations, and hunt for any escape from the everyday violence girls are expected to endure. I’ll Take My Body To-Go is about girls who listened, women who are listening still.”
Work to Do
Jules Wernersbach
April 7, 2026
University of Iowa Press: “Unfolding over the course of a single week during Texas hurricane season, Work to Do pings between the co-op’s first year and present day, as the unionization bid reaches fever pitch. The wind howls, the power goes out, and water creeps through the front door as questions of who owns the grocery store and who has a right to its future are posed. And will the workers ever be paid enough to buy the organic groceries they shelve?”
Reverse Requiem
By Ina Cariño
April 14, 2026
Alice James Books: “These soulful and elegiac poems, written in Cariño’s signature saturated lines, follow a speaker shaped by both subtle and profound personal tragedies. The collection’s emotional resonance is deepened by its formal inventiveness: poems shift in length, tone, and use of white space, mirroring the fractured, nonlinear journey at the book’s heart. The title, Reverse Requiem, suggests a retracing of a life: rather than unfolding chronologically, the poems are guided by the speaker’s shifting mental and emotional states. Early pieces carry a stark, dirge-like weight that gradually gives way to glimmers of hope — proposing that healing, though never linear, remains within reach.”
This Elegance
By Derrick Austin
May 5, 2026
BOA: “Interweaving the sacred and the erotic, This Elegance engages with visual arts through the concept of sacra conversazione (“sacred conversation”), a style of Renaissance painting that imagines divine communion across time and space. For a Black, queer person so often dislocated from time and place, pleasure becomes an act of resistance — a grounding in the now. This Elegance is a love song — an offering to Black artistry, a tribute to visionary lives, and a testament to the power of beauty in even our most precarious moments.”
All Us Saints
By Katherine Packert Burke
May 19, 2026
Bloomsbury: “All Us Saints is a literary family drama packaged as a two-act play. Behind the curtain, Packert Burke unveils Roland’s childhood as a closeted trans girl in the early 90s and offers a brilliant and scathing commentary on the cisgender gaze.”
No God but Us
By Bobuq Sayed
May 26, 2026
Harper: “In this wry, provocative debut, two gay Afghan men — cast out of their respective countries of birth by circumstances beyond their control — collide in Istanbul, a city that will test their willingness to sacrifice everything for the ones they love. Bobuq Sayed’s debut is a story of borders and boundaries transgressed, and a seductive exploration of what it means to make a home at the margins of society. At once an immigrant family saga, a thwarted love story, and a searing portrait of politics made intimately personal, No God but Us is an ambitious introduction to a bold new voice.”
Puck
By Samantha Allen
June 2, 2026
Zando: “In this A Midsummer Night’s Dream-inspired romcom, Puck is a reality show producer and agent of chaos with a talent for bringing people together… and tearing them apart. Written with Samantha Allen’s signature charm, wit, and an irresistible dose of Shakespearian mischief, Puck is the ultimate romcom for our chaotic era, and a celebration of the friendships that carry us through it all.”
Cages
By Chantel Acevedo
June 9, 2026
Europa Editions: “Cages is the story of Felix — a zookeeper in Cuba during the time of the missile crisis, an exile in swinging sixties London, and finally a dying man in 1980s AIDS-era Miami. In this daring novel, Acevedo’s most personal and heartfelt to date, the fragments of Felix’s story are put together like pieces of a puzzle by one who knew him mostly as an absence. Spanning Havana, London, and Miami over a thirty-year arc, Cages explores exile, forbidden love, fractured families, the nature of truth, and the stories we tell to make sense of the people we cannot forget.”
Bottom Feeders
By Arielle Hebert
June 16, 2026
Black Lawrence Press: “This is a landscape of glitter and grime, where young queer love is tested by the tides of addiction and recovery. The collection thrums with a sense of spectacle and surreality, accented by Sarasota’s history as a circus town and Florida’s deadly wildlife — alligators, needlefish, invasive snakes. The heat, humidity, and salt air of the Gulf become characters in their own right, as haunting as the love, grief, and loss found here. Despite the long shadows cast over these poems, there is beauty, friendship, chosen family, and hope in Bottom Feeders.”
We Are Gathered Here Today
By Bobby Finger
June 16, 2026
Putnam: “The Wedding People meets The Celebrants in this hilarious and profound novel about a recently engaged gay man second-guessing marriage, and his cousin’s chaotic Texas wedding weekend with old friends and unexpected strangers that will help guide him to the truth. Like any good wedding, We Are Gathered Here Today is funny, heartfelt, and full of surprises. Like any terrible wedding, it’s something you’ll never forget.”
Southern Review of Books 