Books published by Queer Mojo

“I layer my words like I paint: with intent to create a deeper perspective.” To Boys With Green Hair is a reflection of its writer, during his early 20’s in San Francisco. The concept of this collection began as a way of connecting the author to his roots. But, in the writing process the scope of these works grew to be something more like his then-evergreen Afro. It is now a coming of age: Arthur discovers himself, love, and the taste of an ache.Jackson is motivated to write in the inevitability that someone else in the world is feeling this, too. Holding these pages open, you, the reader, are also the Green Haired Boy.Arthur Jackson V, a California-grown queer kid who grew up an aspiring poet and talented painter. Arthur graduated from Suisun Community College with an AA in Fine Art with a focus in painting. Arthur’s background also includes an extensive look at modern art. His employment at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art helped him find clarity and muse. In 2018, Jackson traveled to Paris, France, not only for inspiration, but also to lay the completing marks of his first book, To Boys With Green Hair. When not working on poetry, Arthur can be found in the kitchen coming up with delicious recipes. Arthur has worked as managing Editor for Genre: Urban Arts where he helped create a by yearly issue [House of Gere] dedicated to queer artists of color. Arthur was also an editor for the Suisun Valley Review where he received honorable mention for the Quentin Duvall Award. His poetry can be found in publications such as Decolonize Mag, Three Lines Poetry, Anaïse, and Spaceships.com.

Beware he who is the protagonist of this tale of the fact of fiction and the fiction of fact and whom will be known and perhaps or perhaps not remembered as a and followed through his and everyone else's empty experiences in this place most call the world and in which such empty experiences...

Daniel W.K. Lee's first collection of poetry is a study on desire's limbs, its breath, its unchecked tendencies on creatures-mortal and divine-who dare to love or be loved. Eros to agape, melancholia to saudade, he finds fruit in these conditions and exposes with carefully selected words and deliberate silence, our hunger.

In this last installment of The Disorder Series, these friends are finally forced to grow up. Marley Kurtz is still looking for love when he discovers he'll also need to look for a new job. Is college still an option? His best friend Missy survives another health scare, and tells her long-suffering boyfriend he needs to move on to be happy.

Songs of the Long Night embraces the lyrical history of poetry while exploring contemporary queer culture through the eyes of a man struggling to navigate his first same sex relationship, a relationship separated by thousands of miles and mere inches simultaneously.

Marley and his friends must each face their own struggle to know the difference between being independent and being alone. They'll find out what they're capable of, even if they have to find out the hard way.

Taking place across a mutating set of darkrooms, art galleries, blank apartments and bedrooms; In Their Arms is an acute inspection of loneliness, desire and confusion. The narrator attempts to simultaneously find himself and become lost completely in a world of sex, internet hook-ups, drugs and pleasure.

With heartfelt honesty, Emanuel Xavier's fourth full-length poetry collection "Nefarious" welcomes the reader into the later second act of a former underage prostitute. This book captures insights into his private world; relationships, heartbreaks, life as a spoken word artist, time spent with his cat, aging. With a dose of dark humor, Xavier's pleasure in the written word and his passion makes this an engaging collection.

Marley Kurtz thinks his past is behind him. Comfortably estranged from his family and working at a bookstore in South Florida, he expects nothing interesting to ever happen to him again. But when a flirtatious author visits the store, and some friends and lovers from his past resurface, Marley is plunged into a world of problems he thought he had left behind. The return of his best friend, Missy, and the introduction of a volatile new substance, alcohol, kick off a series of painful events: the deaths of loved ones both old and young, the loss of trust between Marley and his longtime boyfriend Jesse, and the reemergence of some Kurtz family curses (alcoholism, abandonment, abuse) which affect his younger sister as well. Far from being free of the past, Marley and his friends are mired in it yet again; some will sink, some will swim, and some will merely float.

Told through the eyes of a nameless teenage boy, A Certain Kind of Light sees the narrator attempt to find some kind of cohesion in a life from which he feels increasingly disconnected. As his family, friendships, sexuality and even his taste in music and pornography begin to feel distant from him, his alienation expands. The things that once meant everything to him are stripped of an essence he begins to doubt they ever had. He fixates on a profile of a boy that he finds on the Internet, projecting illusory ideas upon a person that he has never met but feels a profound intimacy with. Feeling more and more lost, he attempts to work out the connection between a disparate set of coincidences, objects and events: a dead, mangled bird, the funeral of his best friend's father, a horrific experience with LSD, obsessive sexual fantasies and the disintegrating suburban life in which he was raised. Intensely emotional and disorientating, A Certain Kind of Light focuses on the intricacies of confusion.

An expanded edition of the poetry collection originally published in 2002.

Star Bryan, 30, handsome, lonely, lost for years in a bad romance. Newly on his own, his quest for identity takes him on a journey through his mind and his past-carved spirits in the gift department at T.J. Maxx, an old crate in his father's attic, a long-hidden diary that casts his family on the wrong side of slavery. And the far-off glitter of a pro basketball career that never happened. He falls in love with the wrong man, then the wrong man falls for him. They're not the same man. Both are jealous-one is dangerous. Born into a high-profile political family, Star finds himself in a web of racial bickering in turn of the 21st Century St. Louis, where both black and white society often balk at those who can move easily between the two-and where being aggressively out of the closet can land him in trouble. Star's imposing body, looks and raw sexual glamour cast him in the eyes of many as a man who can get whatever he wants out of life. Taking it for himself becomes much harder than it seems.

Here is the steamy underside of rural America, the back roads, back doors, and back rooms of a town called Groom, Pennsylvania. Secrets are sacred in a place where one's business is everyone's business, and the erotic stories in Backwoods bare them all. Conceived as a gay-themed erotic take on Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Backwoods is by turn poignant and pornographic, romantic and raunchy, tender and titillating. Literal climaxes are underpinned by an authentic observation of small-town lives, both repressed and unreserved.

Recent runaway Marley Kurtz is back home in Florida after a long road trip. He and his boyfriend Jesse get jobs, move into a loft above a mechanic's garage, and start living the good life. They don't stay free for long however; Marley is eventually pressured into reuniting with the family that sent him away. Far from being disowned, Marley soon finds himself pulled in too many directions at once. Along with his sister, Lindsay, and his boss's new foster son, Tristan, Marley must figure out what kind of family he'll choose to call his own. Will it be the parents who raised and abandoned him, or the friends and adults in his life who have proven they really care? It should be an easy decision, but letting go is never easy.

our bodies are beauty inducers is a fantastic and fantastical exploration of gender and the physical ground upon which it plays. hastain's words explode the amorphous domain where bodies and beauty meet. Electrifying and kinetic, hastain's work shatters and reassembles the physical into intersecting recombinant zones of meaning: the physical induces beauty in the eyes of the other and true beauty received by the other removes otherness...

The military has lots of rules and they are all expected to be followed. United States Marine Corps Sergeant Justin Elzie, wanting to make a difference, followed a rule of integrity and came out publicly on ABC Evening World News in January 1993. He became the first Marine discharged under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and later reinstated, becoming the first Marine to challenge Don't Ask, Don't Tell with a Federal Court Case and went on to serve four years openly gay. Justin Elzie takes you on a journey of self-discovery from his early years growing up on a farm in Wyoming to joining the Marine Corps and finding an underground gay subculture within the military. He was described by his superiors as an exemplary Marine with two meritorious promotions, being named Marine of the Year and having served as an American Embassy Guard. After coming out he was recommended for promotion and served as a Platoon Sergeant in charge of Marines on a ship and in the field. He testified at the Senate Hearings opposite General Schwarzkopf, participated in the MTV show Free Your Mind and was photographed by Richard Avedon for the New Yorker. His story appeared on ABC, CNN, NPR and in the New York Times. Playing By The Rules is one man's struggle for acceptance by his parents, the Marines and the realization that when you play by the rules there are some things that can t be taken away from you.

Self-published as a chapbook in 1997, Pier Queen launched the career of spoken word artist and poet Emanuel Xavier with classics such as "Tradiciones" and "Nueva York"-both featured on Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry-and other poems which captured the voice of a generation of queer people of color. For the first time ever, this ground-breaking collection becomes available featuring snapshots taken at the West Side Highway piers throughout the years by photographer Richard Renaldi. This collaboration is a gift to the LGBTQ community and for those who may be interested in how pier queens became poets and great artists against all odds to inspire others to rise above adversity. Photography by Richard Renaldi.

Saints and Sinners 2012: New Fiction from the Festival contains a mixture of short fiction representing many genres and styles as well as a diverse number of themes and experiences. The completely-blind, three-tier judging process that was used yield what we think is a wonderful set of stories. All of the Top Ten Stories from this year's entries have been included in this anthology. The top three stories this year explore the depth of relationships in all of their complicated and difficult forms while examining what motivates individuals and where they find comfort in a hostile world. These stories in very different ways examine how individuals make the best out of the circumstances society presents them with as well, as the myriad number of factors that affect and influence individuals' decisions to fight or to let go. The winning story, "Wasted Courage", by Jerry Rabushka is a thought-provoking tale of the unlikely relationship between two men-one white and out; the other black, married and on the down-low-and how classism, racism and homophobia work with fear and intolerance to destroy what could possibly be the best thing either man has ever had. The two runner-ups, "Pink Moon" by Pat Spears offers us a snap shot into the life of a homeless, gay Iraq War Veteran who is a failed poet and song writer and his relationship with a homeless man who despite being illiterate carries around a book, and "Wimpy and Rattlesnake Albert" by Jim Stewart which allows us a glimpse at the moment when two migrant works' lives intersect and they find comfort with in each other's stories. The remaining stories in the anthology deal with the board theme of Saints & Sinners and best represent the variety of genres, ages, genders, classes and relationship dynamics covered in the contest submissions this year.

Mikey is a spirited but self-destructive survivor of sexual abuse, a gay Latino native New Yorker caught somewhere between Catholic guilt and club kid decadence looking to fit in as part of a family. Instead, Mikey delves into a demimonde of petty thieves, prostitutes, and pushers. Haunted by a father that Mikey has never met, a difficult childhood, recurring nightmares, the reality of death, and Christ, the story unfolds through the '80's and '90's following him on his journey through a fascinating world filled with Santeros, transsexuals and voguing queens.