The queens shine a rainbow spotlight on some fabulous, emerging queer poets.

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Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Notes:

Xavier Searle is a poet and educator. A recipient of an Academy of American Poets University & College Prize, their work has appeared in The Broken Plate, Stone of Madness, and the anthology Broken Olive Branches. They hold an MFA from North Carolina State University. Read their poem "Elegy."

Deon Robinson (he/him) is a Queer Afro-Latino poet born-and-raised in The Bronx. He received his B.A. in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University, where he was a two-time recipient of the Janet C. Weis Prize for Literary Excellence. Currently, he is a first year MFA Candidate in Poetry at the University of Urbana-Champaign where he is a recipient of a Graduate College Master's Fellowship and selected by Adrian Matejka for the 2022 Hobart L. and Mary Kay Peer Memorial Award. Read Deon Robinson's "(Pleasure-Knowledge) (Knowledge-Pain)" from The Adroit Journal. Visit his website: https://djrthepoet.weebly.com

Kaitlin Hsu 徐欣 (she/她) is a queer Taiwanese poet, translator and editor from the Bay Area. Her work can be found in A Public Space, Poet Lore, Peach Mag and elsewhere. She is a 2024 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and works at Kaya Press as an associate editor. Hsu was also a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Check out Hsu's website at https://myrefoli.github.io and read her poem "As a Child, I Pretended to Be a Tree" here.

Stefania Gomez is a 2025 Luminarts Fellow in Poetry and a 2023 Fulbright Research Award Grantee, and a finalist for the 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and 2023-2024 Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship Semifinalist. She has received additional fellowships from the Dirt Palace, Sewanee Writers Workshop, Lambda Literary, and the International Quilt Museum. She received her MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and teaches Creative Writing at The Chicago High School for the Arts, Chicago’s first public arts high school. Read her poem "Wreck" here and check out her website here.

Another Gomez poem worth your time is "At the New York City AIDS Memorial"

John Bonanni founded and edits the Cape Cod Review. His poems have appeared in North American Review, Foglifter, Black Warrior Review, Washington Square Review, Florida Review, and Gulf Coast, and his literary criticism has been featured in DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, and The Kenyon Review. He teaches on Cape Cod. Visit his website and read "Elegy for Gaeton Dugas" here. Bonnani's book Retrovirology, won the Donald Hall Prize (judged by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers) and will be available in September from the Pitt Poetry Series.

Alec Hershman is the author of the chapbooks Permanent and Wonderful Storage (2019) and The Egg Goes Under (2017), both from Seven Kitchens Press. He lives in Michigan where he teaches literature and writing to college students. His poetry appears widely in literary journals and magazines such as Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Journal, Sycamore Review, DIAGRAM, Columbia, The National Poetry Review, and Harpur Palate. You can find links to his work online at https://alechershmanpoetry.com. Read Hershman's "Mercury Fields."

Denice Frohman is a poet and performer from New York City. She has received support from The Pew Center for the Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poem-A-Day, The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus and elsewhere. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she’s featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to The White House. Currently, she is developing her one-woman show, Esto No Tiene Nombre, which centers the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders. Read or listen to Frohman's poem "Lady Jordan" here and check her website out here: https://www.denicefrohman.com

Zachary Scalzo (he/they) is a queer writer, translator, and theatremaker. They can be found at azachofalltrades.com and on Instagram at @zjscalzo. Their poetry has appeared in journals including Dear Poetry, Ghost City Review, and &Change. Read their poem “Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly.”

Journalist Randy Shilts popularized the concept of "Patient Zero" in his 1987 book, And the Band Played On. By 1987, however, it was known that an infected individual might not display symptoms for several years, and that the study on which Shilts based his assumption was unlikely to have revealed a network of infection. Still, Shilts uncritically spread the story of the Los Angeles cluster study and its ‘Patient 0,’ with long-standing consequences. For more about this, read here.

Director Laurie Lynd released a documentary in 2019, Killing Patient Zero, which delves more into Gaeton Dugas's life. Read more about the documentary here.