2023 IPPY Awards - Poetry Gold 2023 IBPA Awards - Poetry Silver 2023 Publishing Triangle Awards Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry - Finalist Urbanshee is Siaara Freeman's retelling of fairy tales and mythological stories through a modern and urban lens. This collection discusses the weight of being Black in America, Freeman's relationships to lovers and family, and how the physical place you grew up can become part of your identity. Urbanshee expertly combines humor, fantasy, and raw emotion to create this astonishing reinvention of classic fables. Freeman's poems are ventrously unique and are sure to enchant anyone who reads them.

OF WHAT FUTURE ARE THESE THE WILD, EARLY DAYS? An exploration of the role that artists play in resisting authoritarianism with a sci-fi twist. In poetry, dialogue and visual art the book follows two wandering poets as they make their way from village to village, across a prison colony moon full of exiled rebels, robots, and storytellers. Part post-apocalyptic road journal, part alternate universe history of Hip Hop, and part “Letters to a Young Poet”-style toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders, it's also a one-of-a-kind practitioners' take on poetry, power, and possibility. NOT A LOT OF REASONS TO SING is a: -post-apocalyptic road journal -alternate universe history of Hip Hop -“Letters to a Young Poet” -toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders it's also a one-of-a-kind practitioners' take on poetry, power, and possibility.

2023 Stonewall Book Award – Barbara Gittings Literature Award for Poetry Winner 2023 Feathered Quill Book Awards Finalist Revenge Body is Rachel Wiley’s third collection of poetry, full of the sharp wit and bold honesty we know and love from Rachel. Wiley invites her readers to join her on a journey filled with righteous anger, Black identity, magic, mental health, navigating maternal relationships, and the love and loss that comes from a breakup.

Rings on every finger. Hood and educated AF. You've met her. Wearing all her feelings and responding with a side-eye or a tongue-pop. You've seen her. At the grocery store. In restaurants. On the subway. At the bus stop. In a car you pulled up next to blaring whatever matches her mood. Hair in some natural or protective style for the Gods. Ebony Stewart. An around the way girl. One part human, all parts womxn. You know these poems because they be familiar. They be your grandmama, mama, auntie, and sis stories. Welcome to Home.Girl.Hood. Re-released by Button Publishing Inc. 2022.

BloodFresh is a celebration of identity. Ebony Stewart reclaims her own narrative to speak against the racism and colorism she’s experienced, while criticizing society’s treatment of women as sexual objects. This collection reaffirms the reader through storytelling as an open letter to retell, acknowledge, overcome, and learn new ways to use poetry as a coping technique. As BloodFresh reflects the importance of owning your own space, Stewart carves out a home for herself, her poems, and all of the readers who take refuge in her words.

2023 The Black Caucus of the American Library Association - Poetry Winner 2022 Heartland Bookseller Awards Finalist A Peculiar People creates an entire microcosm within these poems. Steven Willis crafts a cast of characters, showcasing their struggles, identities, & underlying emotions. Willis champions the art of storytelling: weaving pop-culture and screenwriting elements to allow the reader to view this social commentary with a fresh lens. This collection examines the author's life experience; the pain of being Black and facing systemic racism.

2021 Button Poetry Short Form Poetry Contest Winner Topaz Winters' third poetry collection spans three countries & three generations. In a far-reaching & deftly woven series of ars poeticas, Winters questions the boundary between the things we inherit & those we owe. Topaz arrives at the grave of the American dream, & unspools the enormous grace & guilt of being loved. So, Stranger stands as a fixed mark between the shifting histories & futures of being a daughter, being an artist, & being an immigrant. If its reader begins as a stranger, they end as part of a lineage: one both of grief & glory, of distance & arrival.