Local Authors

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: Shawna Kenney

These are photographs from my early days of documenting music as a student in Washington, DC and as a journalist living in Los Angeles. I developed much of the film myself in a university darkroom, printed what I could afford, and put the rest into boxes I would drag from east coast to west coast and back again for many years.

I was never comfortable calling myself a photographer. Words came easily to me. A camera, the money for film, the right lighting, the right situation -I found those to be harder to get. Many of these photos were taken with borrowed cameras until I received my own Pentax k1000 in 1995 as a graduation gift.

I feel lucky to have witnessed and captured some of this generation's greatest artists. If punk rock taught me anything, it is that everyone can participate. We all belong. Moving in these alt-rock, hard rock or whatever genre spaces, I was often the only female photographer in the photo pit, on stage or backstage. In the punk scene, this was usually a non-issue, but in bigger venues, it could be frustrating. I wrote the Womanifesto' sometime in the early 2000s, after all of these photos were made.

I stopped shooting on film as soon as cameras were embedded into phones. Now thanks to technology it's easier to sort through what I have. I wanted to put a bunch of it all in one place. I wanted to hold something in my hands. I wanted to share it with you.

Love, Shawna

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: 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: Evelyn Berry (Author), 2023, Paperback

Evelyn Berry's debut poetry collection, Grief Slut, is an examination of the queer lineage of pleasure, grief, and resilience in the American South. Berry offers a portrait of a girl living through boyhood and grappling with the violence of nostalgia in poems that blend high art, archival slivers, and Taco Bell. This collection invites us into a landscape home to sloppy kissers, swamp suitors, scrappy "limbwrecked boys," and drag queens drenched in glitter sweat, where "each day is trespass" and queer youth fight to "hear one another breathe just a little while longer."

By Nina Varela, 2021, Paperback

Critically acclaimed author Nina Varela delivers a stunning sequel to the richly imagined queer epic fantasy Crier’s War, which SLJ called “perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass.”

For too long, Automae have lorded over the kingdom of Rabu, oppressing its human citizens. But the human revolution has risen, and at its heart is Ayla. Once a handmaiden, now a fugitive, Ayla narrowly escaped the palace of Lady Crier, the girl she would’ve killed if she hadn’t fallen in love first. 

Now Ayla has pledged her allegiance to Queen Junn, who can help accomplish the human rebellion’s ultimate goal: destroy the Iron Heart. Without its power, the Automae will be weakened to the point of extinction. Ayla wants to succeed, but can’t shake the strong feelings she’s developed for Crier. And unbeknownst to her, Crier has also fled the palace, taking up among traveling rebels, determined to find and protect Ayla.

Even as their paths collide, nothing can prepare them for the dark secret underlying the Iron Heart.

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