Books published by Autumn House Press

In The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, Eric Tran contends with the aftermath of a close friend's suicide while he simultaneously explores the complexities of being a gay man of color. Grief opens into unraveling circles of inquiry as Tran reflects on the loss of his friend and of their shared identity as gay Asian American men. Through mourning and acute observations, these poems consider how those who experience marginalization, the poet included, may live and fall victim to tragedy. Tran explores how his life, even while in the company of desire and the pursuit of freedom, is never far from danger. Like grief that makes the whole world seem strange, Tran's poetry merges into fantasy lands and rides the lines between imagined worlds and the reality of inescapable loss. At the intersection of queerness, loss, and desire, Tran uses current events, such as the Pulse nightclub tragedy, pop culture references, and comic book allusions to create a unique and textured poetry debut. He employs an unexpected pairing of prayer and fantasy allowing readers to imagine a world of queer joy and explore how grief can feel otherworldly. This collection shows a poet learning how to be afraid, to feel lost, to grieve, and to build a life amid precarious circumstances. The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer was the winner of the Autumn House Rising Writers Prize in 2019.

Praise Song for My Children celebrates twenty-one years of poetry by one of the most significant African poets of this century. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley guides us through the complex and intertwined highs and lows of motherhood and all the roles that it encompasses: parent, woman, wife, sister, friend. Her work is deeply personal, drawing from her own life and surroundings to convey grief, the bleakness of war, humor, deep devotion, and the hope of possibility. These poems lend an international voice to the tales of motherhood, as Wesley speaks both to the African and to the Western experience of motherhood, particularly black motherhood. She pulls from African motifs and proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa to enrich her striking emotional range. Leading us to the depths of mourning and the heights of tender love, she responds to American police brutality, writing "To be a black woman is to be a woman, / ready to mourn," and remembers a dear friend who is at once "mother and wife and friend and pillar / and warrior woman all in one." Wesley writes poetry that moves with her through life, land, and love, seeing with eyes that have witnessed both national and personal tragedy and redemption. Born in Tugbakeh, Liberia and raised in Monrovia, Wesley immigrated to the United States in 1991 to escape the Liberian civil war. In this moving collection, she invites us to join her as she buries loved ones, explores long-distance connections through social media, and sings bittersweet praises of the women around her, of mothers, and of Africa.

Inhabiting the claustrophobia of marriage and domestic life, Erinn Batykefer's poems use the deeply personal as the lens through which she investigates larger cultural ideas. She reckons with feeling simultaneously large and small, finding ways to face herself, and the need to be seen while within the confines of intimate relationships. Honest and explorative, these poems lead us through moments of fluctuation and faltering.

After her adoptive mother's death, Lori Jakiela, at the age of forty, begins to seek the identity of her birth parents. In the midst of this loss, Jakiela also finds herself with a need to uncover her family's medical history to gather answers for her daughter's newly revealed medical ailments. This memoir brings together these parallel searches while chronicling intergenerational questions of family. Through her work, Jakiela examines both the lives we are born with and the lives we create for ourselves. Desires for emotional resolution comingle with concerns of medical inheritance and loss in this honest, humorous, and heartbreaking memoir.

Not Dead Yet studies the uncertainties of loss, turning a gaze toward the often-silenced voices of the infirm, elderly, and adolescent. Rich in humor and honesty, Hadley Moore's debut collection of short stories presents a contemporary set of narratives from a lush cast of characters. We find the protagonists of her stories tenderly revealing their pain after the loss of loved ones and coping with the voids left by the passing of youth, happiness, and fulfilment. Moore invites us into the lives of characters like Morley, who struggles to adapt to new cultural norms, and Salmon, who confronts the loss of her husband while feeling isolated from his family's Judaism. The character-driven prose of Not Dead Yet offers striking detail as it dives into moments of absurdity and tragedy.

Jennifer Renee Blevins's debut memoir, Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story, sheds light on her experiences living with the emotional and psychological struggles of taking up space in a fat-phobic world. Bringing together experiences of personal and national trauma, Blevins adeptly weaves the tale of her father's gastric bypass surgery and subsequent prolonged health crisis with the environmental catastrophe of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Blevins looks to each of these events as a "leak" of American society's pitfalls and shortcomings. These intertwined narratives, both disasters that could have been avoided, reveal points of failure in our systems of healthcare and environmental conservation. Incorporating pieces from her life, such as medical transcripts and quotes from news programs, Blevins composes a mosaic of our modern anxieties. Even through despair, she finds hope in mending broken relationships and shows us how we can flourish as individuals and as a nation despite our struggles. Fierce and haunting, this memoir creates a space of narrative through body, selfhood, family, and country.

The debut poetry collection of Charles Kell, Cage of Lit Glass engages themes of death, incarceration, and family through a range of physical, emotional, and philosophical spaces. In startling images of beauty and violence, Kell creates a haunting world that mirrors our individual and cultural fears.

The stunning, intimate essays in Anxious Attachments take us through the life stages of a woman living in the American Southwest from the 1970s to the present. As she moves from adolescence into adulthood, the narrator grapples with attachments that develop through her family and her ties to the wider world around her while she works as a teacher, writer, and caregiver. Though written from a single woman's perspective, these essays invite us to reflect on the many roles women play and the social factors that touch upon them. Alvarado's stories portray a broad world of experience, reflecting on class, race, and poverty in America with emotional depth and sensitivity.

In Chad Abushanab's debut poetry collection, The Last Visit, he carefully and compassionately explores a family broken by alcoholism and abuse. These poems trace the trajectory of an adolescent living with a violent father struggling with addiction, and recount both the abused child's perspective and his attempts to reckon with his past as he reaches adulthood, chronicling his own struggles with substance abuse and the reverberations of trauma in his life. Amid the violence and hurt, Abushanab's verse renders moments of compassion--even the least sympathetic figures are shown to be grappling with their flaws, and the narrator struggles to find compassion and move beyond the memories and habits that haunt him. These well-crafted poems explore how the past shapes us and how difficult it can be to leave behind.

Often, the fact of being an individual can seem wildly at odds with the experience of containing multitudes. In Luxury, Blue Lace, S. Brook Corfman takes the reader through this complicated experience of selfhood and its multitudes, exploring the many overlapping identities a single person can contain. Corfman's poems conjure a host of identities and selves both living and dead, gesturing towards the complex way memory and loss can inhabit us. Formed by experience, history, and the strictures of gender, the poems dwell on the challenges of fully knowing and understanding the diverse parts of a subject. While they seek out a full form for the individual, they also relish the complex multiplicity of the identities that arise through self-exploration and self-knowledge. Luxury, Blue Lace was the winner of the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in 2018.

Brand new flash fiction by Sherrie Flick

Winner of the 2017 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Contest

The fifth full-length collection from award-winning poet Andrea Hollander

Winner of the 2017 Autumn House Poetry Contest, selected by Alberto Rios

New short story collection by Glori Simmons

Winner of the 2017 Autumn House Nonfiction Contest, selected by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Cameron Barnett's debut poetry collection, selected by Ada Limon as winner of the 2017 Rising Writer Contest

Stunning debut poetry collection

A bold new poetry chapbook by Roberta P. Feins

Debut collection by poet and academic Cherene Sherrard

The newest collection by noted poet and translator Chana Bloch