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By Ed Madden, 2023, paperback

Ed Madden's newest collection explores growing up queer in the fundamentalist South.

Selected by Timothy Liu for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Madden's mastery of the American lyric combines intellect, heart, and courage as he explores growing up queer in the rural fundamentalist South. The poems anatomize a society of shaming and shunning under the guise of love, fighting free to the theme of finding where we belong. The poems work deep into the linguistic textures of his subjects, from queer love to the loss of a parent. The figure of the pooka (or puca) haunts the pages, embodying both good and bad luck, sorrow and hope.

By Ed Madden, 2023, paperback

A Story of the City: Poems Occasional and Otherwise

When Ed Madden was named poet laureate for the City of Columbia, South Carolina, in 2015, he became the first city laureate in the state of South Carolina. During his two terms as city laureate, Madden documented the life and history of the city. He engaged the community by making poetry a public art, posting poems on city buses, sidewalks, movie screens, coffee sleeves, restaurant menus, and faux parking tickets distributed in downtown Columbia one bright and sunny April Fool's Day. While these poems are about a specific city, they ring true for almost any Southern city-maybe any city in America-with its ceremonial occasions and its natural disasters, its misleading public monuments and its protest marches, and its inevitably complex histories. His post officially began with a commemoration of the historic burning of Columbia during the American Civil War and ended with the selection of a new city flag. This collection spans either years of ceremony and controversy, an eclipse and a pandemic, welcomes and elegies, history and hope.

By:  Nicki Pappas, 2022, Paperback

Nicki Pappas experienced abuse as love from a young age. In As Familiar as Family, she explores and examines the ways in which she was groomed for unhealthy relationships and toxic religion.

This book chronicles her journey to find her voice — and a way out — which began once she understood how the spiritual abuse, power dynamics, narcissism, and emotional detachment in the church were as familiar as family.

By sharing her story, she hopes to empower others to leave anything toxic in their own lives.

By: Nicki Pappas (Author), Stephen Kappas (Author), Kimberly Marsh (Editor), 2023, Paperback

In honor of the journey Nicki and Stephen Pappas have been on individually and together, they wrote Becoming Egalitarian. In Becoming Egalitarian, they examine their limited (and limiting) beliefs about marriage and gender roles. They begin with why they were drawn to complementarianism and explore how their theology shifted to egalitarianism.

Becoming Egalitarian is their story, but it’s not just their story. There are untold numbers of people who have been harmed by religious ideologies that prop up unhealthy power dynamics. Nicki and Stephen found that by actively dismantling the hierarchy in their relationship, they could become true partners. Becoming Egalitarian isn’t an answer book. Rather, it is a vulnerable and authentic exploration of how to find a healthier partnership when operating from a place of mutuality.

By: Buddy Shay (Author), 2022, Paperback

Brighton of the former glorified nation, Aerodom, is on the brink of collapse as the savage races conspire to enslave its inhabitants under the orcish kingdom. This tale weaves together the intimate lives of humans, elves and dwarves as they urgently fight for their freedom against all odds. Drawing the battlelines, Brighton Under Siege asks the question: where lies the three-faced god, Maot, when greedy city-states turn their back on the fallen. In bursts, we see the sheer determination of individuals who refuse to let themselves lapse into defeatism and find prevailing strength through unexpected fellowships. By the end, we come to terms with Rolf's reckoning that, "There'll be time. When Maot blesses it, it will be."

By Baker A. Rogers, 2019 Paperback

This book explores Mississippi Christians’ beliefs about homosexuality and gay and lesbian civil rights and whether having a gay or lesbian friend or family member influences those beliefs. Beliefs about homosexuality and gay and lesbian rights vary widely based on religious affiliation. Despite having gay or lesbian friends or family members, evangelical Protestants believe homosexuality is sinful and oppose gay and lesbian rights. Mainline Protestants are largely supportive of gay and lesbian rights and become more supportive after getting to know gay and lesbian people. Catholics describe a greater degree of uncertainty and a conditional acceptance of gay and lesbian rights; clear differences between conservative and liberal Catholics are evident. Overall, conservative Christians, both evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics, hold a religious identity that overshadows their relationships with gay and lesbian friends or family. Conservative religion acts as a deterrent to the positive benefits of relationships with gay and lesbian people. 

By: Mark Daniel Compton (Author), Erin Chandler (Editor), Brooke Lee (Designer), 2023, Paperback

Like the holiday staple, this novel is topped with cherries, filled with nuts and fruit, and doused with a healthy dose of spirits. The ghost from Christmas past in this tale is no Marley; he is an incubus freed from hell and chained to a fruitcake that is continually regifted, causing much havoc in the small Southern town of Dixon. This demon, accidentally released, is on the run from an old domestic housekeeper/voodoo root doctor, the eccentric family she nurtured and raised, and a slew of angelic forces, all determined to send him back to hell from whence he came.

By: Augustus Jenkins Farmer, III, 2023, Paperback

In the 1990s, a South Carolina town built its first botanical garden. For a small town, that was big news. For a small Southern town, that it was led by two gay men and a feminist was astounding.

Their lives and plant choices raised eyebrows as the Garden became a national showcase for new styles, even earning recognition on HGTV's "Secrets of Great Gardens."

One of the young men, Jenks Farmer, had previously left the conservative South but returned with a mission: to challenge traditional notions of garden beauty, which clung to formality and associated certain plants with stigmas of poverty and race.

These Garden Disruptors challenged genteel social norms of race, homophobia, and sexism while shoveling compost, searching for plants, and planting flowers. The crew of creative misfits built a garden that attracts millions of people today.

In this novel-like true story, Jenks Farmer's soulful voice shares the story of a mismatched crew of real, dirty-handed gardeners who not only planted the garden but set its mission.

Through these characters, Jenks also recounts the history of elitist horticulture, of sexual and racial discrimination in gardens, and of how social norms changed drastically in the South during the period of garden buildings.

By Marla Taviano, 2022 Paperback, Poetry

For those of us who are picking up pieces of life and faith and figuring out how to heal and move forward, jaded: a poetic reckoning with white evangelical christian indoctrination is a collection of poems—short, thoughtful, brave, and spicy—about getting stuff off our chests. Covering topics like evangelical scare tactics, sex and purity, patriarchy, white supremacy, and how the church treats the queer community, these poems say more in fewer words and with zero sugar-coating. With an appendix jam-packed with books to read on your journey, this is a book that will open you up and take you forward. Warning: you might not be able to put it down.

After author Marla Taviano wrote unbelieve, a book of poems chronicling her faith deconstruction, her plan was to move on from white evangelical Christianity to bigger, lovelier, more all-embracing thoughts. But she couldn’t do it. Why? Because she was still jaded—and knew there was work left to do.

Jaded is this former good Christian girl’s offering—a labor of anger and love. We might not need to stay here forever, but we need this now.

By Baker A. Rogers, 2021, Paperback

While drag subcultures have gained mainstream media attention in recent years, the main focus has been on female impersonators. Equally lively, however, is the community of drag kings: cis women, trans men, and non-binary people who perform exaggerated masculine personas onstage under such names as Adonis Black, Papi Chulo, and Oliver Clothesoff.  
 
King of Hearts shows how drag king performers are thriving in an unlikely location: Southern Bible Belt states like Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina. Based on observations and interviews with sixty Southern drag kings, this study reveals how they are challenging the region’s gender norms while creating a unique community with its own distinctive Southern flair. Reflecting the region’s racial diversity, it profiles not only white drag kings, but also those who are African American, multiracial, and Hispanic. 
 
Queer scholar Baker A. Rogers—who has also performed as drag king Macon Love—takes you on an insider’s tour of Southern drag king culture, exploring its history, the communal bonds that unite it, and the controversies that have divided it. King of Hearts offers a groundbreaking look at a subculture that presents a subversion of gender norms while also providing a vital lifeline for non-gender-conforming Southerners.

By Tayler Simon (signed copy)

Poetry

By Nicki Pappas, 2024, Paperback

signed, poetry

By: Bakari Sellers (Author), 2021, Paper back

New York Times Bestseller

What J. D. Vance did for Appalachia with Hillbilly Elegy, CNN analyst  and one of the youngest state representatives in South Carolina history Bakari Sellers does for the rural South, in this important book that illuminates the lives of America’s forgotten black working-class men and women.

Part memoir, part historical and cultural analysis, My Vanishing Country is an eye-opening journey through the South's past, present, and future.

Anchored in in Bakari Seller’s hometown of Denmark, South Carolina, Country illuminates the pride and pain that continues to fertilize the soil of one of the poorest states in the nation. He traces his father’s rise to become, friend of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, a civil rights hero, and member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) , to explore the plight of the South's dwindling rural, black working class—many of whom can trace their ancestry back for seven generations.

In his poetic personal history, we are awakened to the crisis affecting the other “Forgotten Men & Women,” who the media seldom acknowledges. For Sellers, these are his family members, neighbors, and friends. He humanizes the struggles that shape their lives: to gain access to healthcare as rural hospitals disappear; to make ends meet as the factories they have relied on shut down and move overseas; to hold on to precious traditions as their towns erode; to forge a path forward without succumbing to despair. 

My Vanishing Country is also a love letter to fatherhood—to Sellers' father, his lodestar, whose life lessons have shaped him, and to his newborn twins, who he hopes will embrace the Sellers family name and honor its legacy.

By: Willie Lee Kind III, 2023, Paperback

As a young, Black, queer person in a small town in the South where everyone knows everyone, Orders of Service is a coming-of-age exploration of the everyday fever of fleeting relationships, while capturing the romantic, psychic quotidian of the Bible Belt. This commentary on gospel traditionalism is armed with dreams of helping to reshape lived realities where being your truest self could be shunned or ostracized in deeply religious communities. It ruminates on this Deep South narrative by exploring how the age of social media has created a rich underground counterculture that offsets the surface rituals of grief and shame. The poems illuminate lineages of performance and fellowship for queer descendants of the last Black folks out of the Carolina cotton fields, and features Anansi-like speakers (Anansi is a trickster spider featured in West African and Caribbean folklore) while delving into old-school sensibilities and advice. This gospel-fugue bends language in the backwoods of faith and desire. Pulling figures from the stories of childhood―Icarus, a flying boy wanting to escape; Asterion the Minotaur―the wandering son of someone absent; Medusa, a wronged person portrayed as a mankiller; Cerberus, a beastly guardian intent on being a “good” boy― these poems are punky, preachy, prissy, and pink-collar, and all help create the fever-dream that is Orders of Service.

By: Marla Taviano, 2023, Paperback

Hey There, Word Artist!

Yes, you. If you love words—reading them, writing them, hanging them on your wall and looking at them, putting them together in fun ways, making collages—you’re a word artist.

Maybe you love words, but you’ve never really thought about “word art” as a thing.

Word art is a really cool way to mix artistic mediums. It’s basically language + visual images. Words + pictures.

In this book, there are all kinds of words you can cut out and add to any photo, illustration, painting—whatever—to create your own word art. And hopefully you’ll use your own words as well.

Then, if you’d like, hang it on your wall or your refrigerator or give it to a friend or share it with the world.

We could all really use more word art made with love