Writing is a beautiful outlet that lets us express our emotions and fully articulate everything around us. For the LGBTQ+ community, poetry is an essential art form because it helps us understand all the complex emotions we go through and the even more complicated society we live in. By having queer poets who share their work with society, the community is given people who resonate with what they’ve been through and can see different perspectives into the variety of identities there are. To celebrate all the creative aspects of queer expression, let’s take a look at five LGBTQ+ poets who have recently published their work.
M. Mick Powell
M. Mick Powell is a queer Black Cabo Verdean femme poet, artist, and author. Her work explores concepts in queerness, Black girlhood, and grief over personal losses. They teach at Bay Path University for their creative nonfiction program. She enjoys being in love, chasing waterfalls, and roller skating in her free time.
Her work includes chapbooks such as threesome in the last Toyota Celica and her book, DEAD GIRL CAMEO. She situates her work in the Black queer femme existence and examines topics in revolution, revelation, and revival. Her book ventures into pop women’s legacies to discover how they overcame conventional representation and navigate abuse and their survival. Her speculative verses and sensual imagery draw readers into her poetry to take them beyond what they know about the Black queer experience, and life itself, to create a new perspective into a world of love, loss, and grief.
Seán Hewitt
Seán Hewitt is a memoirist, novelist, and literary critic, going hand-in-hand with his work as a poet. He is an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin for Literary Practice and a Fellow in the Royal Society of Literature.
His work includes his memoir, All Down Darkness Wide; an illustrated anthology called 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World; and his debut novel, Open, Heaven. His work focuses on sexual awakenings, historical queer love, yearning, and desire in his exploration into the path of queer love that has shaped the community throughout our history. His writing is mesmerizing in its grace, and his storytelling is intense and passionate in its own capacity. He gives readers a space to explore queer love in all of its hopeful and tragic parts to piece together the concept of what it means to love as a queer person.
Fatimah Asghar
Fatimah Asghar is a fiction writer, filmmaker, and poet who prioritizes story over genre. Their work explores identity, borders, family, and relationship themes to examine the box society tries to put us in and how we can escape it. They utilize collaboration in their work, as they find it essential in developing their thinking.
Their work includes their books, If They Come For Us and When We Were Sisters, along with the anthology Halal If You Hear Me, which they co-edited with Safia Elhillo. Asghar is insistent in creating alternate possibilities regarding identity, relationships, and humanity. Their storytelling capabilities take readers on an emotional ride of life and death and all the meaning that comes with both concepts. Readers will become entranced with their writings as their explorations into the diaspora and the complexities of family leave us in the middle of an aching love story we so desperately want to read.
Brittany Rogers
Brittany Rogers is an essayist, visual artist, mother, and high school teacher who also explores her life as a Black queer femme poet. Her work focuses on the concept of audacity as she delves into topics of women, pleasure, autonomy, adornment, and matrilineage. When she is not writing, she can be found teaching the art of poetry.
Her work has been featured in various publications, including Detroit Pastoral for Four Way Review and Black Girl Sips Tea With Nina Simone in ArtLit Lab, as well as her debut collection of poems, Good Dress. Good Dress goes into all the themes Rogers loves to explore, including Black Detroit, womanhood, class, and community, as readers watch the poet discover her autonomy as an adult. She examines what it means to belong to something in any capacity, whether to a city, a partnership, or even ourselves. Her work as a whole succeeds in pushing boundaries and expectations in her attempts to subvert the heteronormative and patriarchal expectations we find to be pushed on Black femmes.
Raye Hendrix
Raye Hendrix is a writer, disability scholar, editor, and photographer born in Alabama. They earned their BA and MA from Auburn University and their PhD from the University of Oregon. Currently, she teaches at the University of Tennessee in the English Department and is an editor for Press Pause Press and DIS/CONNECT: A Disability Literature Column.
Their work focuses on disability, mental health, the LGBTQ+ community, environmentalism, and women. Hendrix has been published in anthologies like Let Me Say This, chapbooks such as Every Journal is a Plague Journal, several journals like American Poetry Review, and her book What Good Is Heaven. As a bisexual poet, their work centers around the complex relationship between love and violence. Her book explores this concept in the view of farm life deep in the Appalachian foothills while mirroring the experience queer people and women face in the community. She examines the question of what it means to love and be loved by the very thing that has been harming you.
LGBTQ+ poets are essential in our society because their contributions help others learn more about the community and what it means to live everyday as a queer person in our society. We must continue to support these artists and their work so they can continue to create poetry that brings comfort and perspective into the ongoing conversation.
For more LGBTQ+ poet recommendations, click here.
For more poetry recommendations, check out our For the Love of Poetry bookshelf on Bookshop.org.
