Abode Press Hybrid Reader, august chun, interviewed Aerik Francis about their body-focused work and the inspirations that led to its creation. Keep reading to learn more about the chapbook, Francis, and more!

Book Description:

If radical means to the root, radical politics must attend to the body.

Written for the vast spectrum of bodies, Aerik Francis’s BODYPOLITIC offers poetry as a catalyst: for movement, for empowerment, and for liberation-minded education rooted in global awareness and local action. This collection of poems questions what it means to live fully inside one’s own body in a society that seeks to regulate, define, or erase bodies. These poems ask readers to reexamine their relationship with their bodies as an act of self-knowledge, resistance, and radical permission to express oneself. Beyond the individual self, BODYPOLITIC also explores how bodies exist within larger bodies of power. Embedded in the history of these political processes are people, Francis’s people, the vast history of peoples fighting against oppressive powers and systems. BODYPOLITIC opens space for a candid conversation with ourselves about what we want, who we are becoming, and who we really want to be.

1. Your first chapbook (BODYELECTRONIC) was also about bodily existence, and in your substack post on BODYPOLITIC, you write about Aliya Rahman, ICE, and surveillance capitalism: what does it mean to write about and occupy a body in this era of continued violence, antiBlackness, xenophobia, surveillance, and fascism?

Hi august, thank you so much for having me and thank you for the kind words and keen questions!

It’s just so awful what fascism is doing to people and all of our bodies, particularly those in prisons and detentions and concentration camps. To not have access to clean water, good food, healthcare, sanitary and safe living conditions, and worse, to have attempts to secure access violently thwarted. And even knowing and bearing witness to these atrocities takes a toll on the body. So much of what I hope my writing does is to fight against these oppressive systems in whatever ways I can.

I see the body as the beginning of our politics: the ways we can and cannot control our body’s abilities, appearances, needs, and desires, as well as the way these interact with other people and other living beings. For this, I think talking about the body can be a way of making a space of common ground to grow and develop a politic beyond partisan lines.

Talking about bodies also shines light on what's at risk and what is at stake. How can I be willing to put my body on the line if I’m not even willing to put my body in a line?

But in the midst of all of this, I also think it is important to talk about the possibility and potentiality of bodies: as sites of wonder, of pleasure, of discovery, of resistance, of change. And so, I wanted to write about bodies in new versions, bodies in healing, bodies in acceptance, bodies in progress, bodies fully in fluidity. I think our bodies can and do feel and respond to these complexities when shared.

2. So many of your poems in BODYPOLITIC are referential: I see you invoke Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, Shaista Abdul Aziz Patel, Cameron Awkward-RIch, Wanda Coleman, and more. I see your work as always in conversation to ancestors, community, comrades, and I love that one of your poems “Lying to Live” is in reference to a conversation between Black literary luminaries Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin. What is the significance for you in having your work communicate and be in conversation with other poets, writers, and community?

I believe in a poetics of reference, knowing that my work and words came to be because of the work and words of so many others. I am always thinking of the words of Sara Ahmed from her book Living a Feminist Life: “Citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings… we can hope to create a crisis around citation, even just a hesitation, a wondering, that might help us not to follow the well-trodden citational paths.” In this time where many people and many cultures are being targeted for erasure, modes of reference continue connections and forge deeper relationships, not just between writer and reference, but also among readers. And much like a scientific mode of citation, I see the references as a challenge to the reader to go directly to the source, almost as if to say, “You don’t have to take my word for it, see for yourself.”

So much of my writing practice is interwoven with my music practice, and often, allusion becomes a kind of adhesive to connect everything together. So much of my writing practice is interwoven with my reading practice [is interwoven with my life practices…]. It continues to feel important to, at the very least, speak the name of the person from whom a creation sprouted. I hope it also provides a reminder, if only to myself, of how inspiration can more reliably be generated from a robust reading practice than sudden epiphany.

As a final quick note on this topic, many of the poems use an ampersand to represent the word “and”, and while there is a stylistic choice to that, I also view the ampersand as a little body itself. It has a body and it connects bodies together. I also think it represents this desire toward inclusion and reference, as making space for possibility and continuation.

3. The title makes it obvious that the body is going to feature large in the chapbook-- and it’s true! In “Am I A Body?” for example, you take the reader through this visceral feeling when you “remove the muscles/cut the fat, shuck/the guts, break”-- but what I feel like you do so well is play with the body of the poems. In “Junetee[n]th”, a single letter removed blooms into an entirely new part of a poem, and evolving that into a poem, and “No Breasts” is born out of hacking and removal in “Gynecomastia (Breasts)”. Can you share more about this experience of writing poetry to and about the body but also writing poetry as the body?

I love this question of writing poetry as the body, and I wanted to invite that sense and that realness into the work. While the beginning of “Am I A Body” takes a quote from Roland Barthes and turns it into a thought experiment, the end is punctuated by the body. I suppose I could have kept writing and thinking through the poem, but at the time, my legs were actually growing numb, and it felt necessary to include that in, that my body was speaking to me in the real time of the writing. How and where one begins and ends a poem is always a question dependent on the context of the work, but in this case, the body determined both.

One thing I am amazed by in the thought of bodies is how everyone has a body and how each one is different. What fundamentally makes up a body? There are as many answers as there are bodies. Our bodies can, do, and will change: abilities come and go, wellness comes and goes, marks and scars come and stay. It’s very scary but it's also so wondrous. For me, poetry is a space where I can not only represent change, but also enact change. A poem’s form can change like a body’s form because the poem, too, has a body. And in many ways, I can shape my poetry body more easily than my physical body, though in many ways it bears the same restrictions on its form. “Fat4Fat” for instance, could have longer lines in another version, or prose poems like Body Language or My { } Hump or “Gynecomastia (Breasts)” could look different depending on the size of the page. I think about this reading and performing these poems too, how each time is different depending on so many variables.

4. In addition to being a writer, you are a talented video/mixed media artist! You’ve produced videos for poemsongs like “Cosmologic”, and I’ve read that you have some background in slam. This comes to mind for me because I think of the difference between the physical body a poem might have on the page and the form it takes in your ears. Can you tell me more about your process for creating these poemsongs, and how it adds to your experience of writing a poem? Will we see some for the poems in BODYPOLITIC?

The poemsongs are kind of a mystery to me too, often it feels like they appear in an extemporaneous burst rather than a methodological process. Mostly I try to be attentive to the poems and listen closely if they want to try new mediums or new genres.

I kind of see the music and the writing processes as separate. More often than not, the poemsongs combine music with already written poems as opposed to writing to the music. And more often than not, I don’t write poems with the expectation that they will be accompanied by music. That said, I do write with the idea that what is written will be spoken aloud, and given that, I like to try and incorporate as many musical elements to my poetry as I can/as the poem allows for (as every poem is different). Because my poems have many musical elements baked into it, it becomes easier to match the poems to music later on.

Similarly, music making feels like a separate process, though it is a very similar feeling. Sometimes the music gestures out to the poems and their lyrics– at various times, sometimes immediately and sometimes years later. When that happens, it gets to be fun to experiment and see about flow and fit. Something I find fascinating is when a rhyme scheme emerges from a poem that didn’t seem to have any previous focus on rhyme or rhythm. Or a chorus emerges from poems that didn’t previously seem to have repeats or refrains.

I’m hoping to make poemsongs out of BODYPOLITIC, but nothing exists so far. That said, I have plans to collaborate with musicians to make it happen in the coming months, so look for updates!

5. BODYPOLITIC is your third chapbook since 2022! At this point in your writing career, what have you learned from all three of your projects?

I learned that a project never concludes in the ways you think it might. Each project is still living its own particular life in the world. BODYELECTRONIC still comes up despite it being out of print. MISEDUCATION is still being read, still being performed in its own way. Even BODYPOLITIC is taking on new lives in ways I would have never thought possible before its publication.

I am also enjoying how each project is living with each other– how my reading sets sometimes include poems from each project and they are able to converse with each other and the audience in unique ways. I wasn’t expecting the ways in which the new projects carry the old projects forward.

I feel more aware of the values and limitations of chapbooks. That said, each project has had its own journey, just as people have their own journeys and receptions of their books and projects. Each project has given me opportunities to embrace humility and grace and gratitude for the ways they can and do make impacts rather than dwell too long on their shortcomings.

As a writer, they have given me more security in my taste and decision making. I feel more confident in organizing collections and more comfortable in advertising them.

6. What’s next for you?

I don’t know for sure! I have a few full-length poetry manuscripts that are ready and waiting for the right publisher. I also have been really into making music and have some projects cooking up for some near future. As much as I’d love for all of these to be released ASAP, I’m trying to relish in my time as Adams County Poet Laureate and continue to open up poetry portals. MISEDUCATION and BODYPOLITIC are both still having their moments in the world and I want to continue to give those projects time and space to continue meeting new audiences.

I often go back-and-forth about applying to MFA programs, so maybe that… or maybe not! In any case I hope I’ll continue to perform and write and facilitate poetry workshops, continuing to share and sharpen old work as well as continuing to craft new material.

About the Author

Aerik Francis is a Queer Black Latinx poet born and based on the lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples currently known as Denver, Colorado, USA. Aerik is currently the poet laureate of Adams County, Colorado. Aerik wants us to come together and gum up the gears of the machinery of the empire toward all of our collective liberation. They are the author of poetry chapbooks BODYPOLITIC (Abode Press, 2026) and MISEDUCATION (New Delta Review, 2023). Find more of their work on their website phaentompoet.com or via social media @phaentompoet.

About the Interviewer

August Chun is a queer, Han Chinese writer, organizer, and researcher based on unceded Ohlone land (Bay Area California) and unceded Algonquin land (Eastern Ontario, Canada).

There are a limited number of copies left of BODYPOLITIC. Grab your copy here!

We open for our chapbook submission prize on August 15th! We will be accepting poetry chapbooks up to 30 pages and hybrid chapbooks up to 40 pages. We look forward to reading your submissions and thank you for sending your work to us!

Learn more about our chapbook prize here: Submissions | Abode Press

Pre-order Our Next Chapbook: Recipes for Grief by Jonathan Wlodarski

We’re incredibly excited to introduce our next chapbook: Recipes for Grief by Jonathan Wlodarski!

Book Description: Not all hunger can be satisfied by food. Recipes for Grief by Jonathan Wlodarski is a collection of three surreal stories where food and mourning become inseparable. In “The Cake,” a funeral cake slowly drives an isolated town to sacrifice itself for one more taste. In “Spider Lung,” a caterer who coughs up spiders confronts grief, illness, and the limits of medicine must decide how he wants to face his own death. In “The Bread and the Bird,” a son struggles to preserve his family’s magical bakery while caring for his abusive, dying father. Through strange, unsettling worlds, these stories explore what we consume to survive loss as well as what loss asks us to surrender. Recipes for Grief is a meditation on death, family, hunger, and the ways we nourish ourselves when comfort is no longer enough.

Jonathan Wlodarski is a graduate of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His book Love Letters to a Future Ice Age is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. His work has appeared in F(r)iction, Foglifter Journal, and The Forge Literary Magazine, among other venues.

Welcome Crystal Odelle: Our New Senior Hybrid Editor!

We are so excited to welcome Crystal Odelle to lead our Hybrid Chapbook team. Crystal began reading with Abode when we first started and found her way back to us. Because of her fearless championship for incredible work, strong editorial experience with Newfound and others, and a renowned writer herself, we couldn’t be more grateful to promote Crystal to lead the section. Learn more about her below!

Learn more about Crystal: Author of Trans Studies, Crystal Odelle (they / she) is a storyteller of trans / polyamorous / whore practice, writing and revising into the desire for something like a life. Their stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, Split Lip Magazine, smoke and mold, Apogee, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. A Lambda Literary fellow and McCormack Writing Center Scholar, Crystal was awarded the 2026 Waasnode Short Fiction Prize selected by Megan Milks and anthologized in We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction. She co-organizes Changeling Queer Series and serves as senior hybrid editor at Abode Press. Her writing and performances trouble the divide between fiction and reality toward liberation.

Fall 2026 Workshops!

Our Fall 2026 workshops are officially live for the rest of year, and we have four incredible programs coming your way. Read about them and snag your tickets!

• Epistolary Poetics against Prisons led by Dkéama Alexis on Sat, August 15th from 12-130pm CT. In an increasingly technologically-dependent world, letters remain a critical link between our incarcerated comrades and the outside world. In this workshop, attendees will reflect on their own letter-writing practices, learn about the role of letter-writing within the tradition of supporting Black political prisoners, and then choose between two writing activities: creating a Black August-themed epistolary poem or writing a letter to an incarcerated Black freedom fighter. Get tickets here.

• Unlearning Adult Supremacy: Writing Toward Youth Liberation led by Sirajum Sandhi on September 5th from 1-3:00 CT. Adult supremacy is one of the oldest violences we inherit — a quiet architecture that teaches us whose voices matter, whose bodies are believable, whose futures are worth protecting. This workshop invites writers to name, interrogate, and undo adult supremacy as a cultural logic rooted in colonialism, racial capitalism, and slavery — and to imagine youth liberation as essential to collective freedom. Get tickets here.

• Fictionalizing the Family Archives led by Noelani Piters on October 10th. What happens when we turn our attention to family and what our ancestors leave us? What is revealed when we reimagine shared history and that which we do not know? How can we honor the stories we inherit, while also incorporating our own perspectives? In this 1.5-hour generative class, we will read, listen, and look closely at literary and visual work that engages family and heritage through innovative and surprising methods. Then, we will use our own family archives as a jumping-off point. “Fictionalizing” in the context of this class is loose, allowing for emotional truths, hybrid explorations, and a sense of play to take the lead. We’ll experiment with literary devices, forms, and perspectives to create evocative writing that is rooted in the real. Get tickets here.

• Writing to Remember: Intro to Flash Prose led by Tala Khanmalek aka mecca monarch on November 28th. Flash prose, whether fictional or non-fictional, is characterized by its capacity to tell an unforgettable story in very few words.In this workshop, we will approach flash prose as a self-contained window onto socio-historical processes that emerge from our most specific lived experiences and in particular, memories. Get tickets here.

Book News!

How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse officially landed on our shelves on Friday, July 31st.

We are excited to be tabling at the book launch in San Antonio, Texas on Wed, August 26th from 630-830pm at the Juice Joint where the launch will be led by Poesia y Joteria (a queer Spanglish open mic series in SATX). There will be poetry readings, music by Son Queers, plus platica y chismecito. We hope to see you there!

Aerik Francis, author of BODYPOLITIC, was recently featured in The Poets Podcast where they discussed their chapbook and more. Listen to the episode here.

MK Thekkumkatil was recently featured in smoke and mold for an interview about their newest book The Sexuality of Care and their Abode chapbook Weaving Liberation. Read the interview here.

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to acknowledge accomplishments in the Abode Press family.

• Addie Tsai’s cyanopoem was accepted into an online cyanotype exhibition to celebrate World Cyanotype Day. Find it here!

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

Book Description: Weaving Liberation: An Archival Chapbook is a hybrid chapbook that documents one year of refusing genocide against Palestinians. Drawing connections between Palestinian liberation, relationship with land, nursing during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, transness, diaspora, and fishing, this collection offers an archive and genuflection to the communities that have come together for Palestinian liberation. Situated in the specificity of Dena'ina Land, the chapbook's ephemera includes ceremonial scripts from actions, letters to an assembly member, and essays written in grief, rage, and desperation.

Mike: Weaving Liberation: An Archival Chapbook moves between many genres without clearly separating them. When considering the structure of this book, what led you to choose that braided framework instead of a more traditional narrative form?

M. K.: Weaving Liberation: An Archival Chapbook came together as the year-mark of the escalation of genocide against Palestinians approached. Collecting these essays, protest writing, and letters, and taking time to honor the work we were, and are, doing to resist genocide, to free Palestine, the land, and each other, felt like an urgent act of hope. The genocide continues, and my friend Mayar continues to witness explosions and killings perpetrated by the zionist entity. She recently tried to visit her aunt, who had heart surgery, and saw the Zionist entity’s army advancing. As the genocide continues, it might seem strange to look at the past and talk about writing towards hope, about the ways we cultivate hope, or about archiving as centrally an act of hope, but, even as I write this, my relationship with Mayar is one rooted in hope.

I can’t talk about Weaving Liberation without doing some weaving in these interview questions as well, but to tighten these strands against each other, so maybe they take shape: I’m someone who has long turned to the archives to root myself in the struggles, resilience, strategies, and practices of those who came before me. Lineage is incredibly important to me: nothing I write or say has been done in isolation. Everything I am is a collaboration with my ancestors, with the land, with the brilliant and complicated people I’m surrounded by. As my community organized against genocide, built relationships, and supported each other through the normalization, gaslighting, and repression that fighting for Palestine was, and is, met with, I wanted to collect the ephemera of our efforts. Because this organizing took place on Dena’ina land, there’s the very real chance that the record of our resistance could have been erased. As a guest on this land, I consider the chapbook to be a genuflection: an act of devotion, bending my knee to my community and the lineages of Indigenous resistance that connects these lands to Palestine. The erasure of resistance serves the oppressor: our fight needed to be known, even if just for each other, so we can remember the liberatory possibilities created when we work toward a world worth fighting for.

The structure of the book, then, is a chronological journey through organizing from October 2023 to October 2024. It contains both the archived documents, like the scripts and letters, and essays I wrote in trusting, liberatory relationships. It took the shape it was meant to be—I really ceded control over what this archive wanted to be.

Mike: You speak extensively about care Weaving Liberation. What connections do you see between caregiving and political resistance?

M. K: Such a complicated question, one that I could answer in many ways! First, when I think about periods of my life that I’ve been most actively involved in organizing, I think about moments of intimate care: learning each other’s food restrictions and feeding each other; curating the action to meet the access needs of neurodivergent and disabled beloveds; holding each other after confronting state violence; regulating with each other. In my life and in the lives of my beloveds, care has made resistance possible.

When I think about the times I was unable to stay involved in organizing, I remember burnout, drinking, compassion fatigue, and self-abandonment. My care needs weren’t being met in both big and small ways. I dealt with that through self-destruction. I did not have the structure of support to allow me to live differently. When I eventually received that support, I became more able to imagine, and fight for, a different future for myself and others. This is a super simplified answer, but there’s definitely more on this in my upcoming essay collection, The Sexuality of Care: On Nursing, Kink, and a Future Without Hospitals.

As I came back into organizing these last few years, it felt vital for me to organize from my positionality as a nurse. Healthcare workers in Palestine have been intentionally targeted by the zionist entity, and these are my colleagues: they are the people who have the same kind of training as I do, who respond in crisis in similar ways, who have dedicated their lives to the care of others. Whether I like it or not, nurses are my people: we share a language and an ethic; we often have similar trauma and coping mechanisms; we chose a profession that requires we put others’ needs above our own. We carry extremely specialized skills required for resistance: to see a person in need and act, to assess quickly, to triage, and to use our hands in service of others, even when it does not serve us at all.

All that to say, I’m always thinking about bodies, our needs, how we can care for each other, how we can create networks of care so abundant that people can stretch outside their comfort zones and show up in ways they never have before. We’re building worlds with every act of resistance, and care is required to make that possible.

Mike: Recurring metaphors that stood out to me while reading include water, fishing nets, and, of course, weaving. What drew you to those images as a way of thinking about liberation and relationships?

M. K.: I’m really tempted to give multiple answers to every question—a greedy bisexual who does not want to choose! So, my first answer is that fish and fishing practices are extremely important to the culture and ways of life of both my homeland and where I live now. I wrote the title essay while visiting my homeland, staring at fishing nets strewn about beach shelters, and wondering how I could be one knot in a net strong enough, resilient enough, to cultivate safety, belonging, and liberation.

What’s not as explicit in Weaving Liberation, but is more explicit in The Sexuality of Care, is that I’m a kinky freak, and I love to play with rope. When using rope to bind a lover, I extend my grasp, create feeling beyond my hands, and curate feeling. Once rope is on someone, they feel everything I’m doing to the rope, even if I’m not touching them. I think about this as one metaphor related to weaving: moving these fibers alongside, onto, and against a body physicalizes unseen connections. Liberation requires cultivating unseen connections, surrendering to relationships we can’t predict.

Mike: The book repeatedly returns to the idea that community is central to survival. How has writing this book changed the way you think about community and liberation?

M. K.: As an ICU nurse, I became extremely isolated during the first few years of the pandemic. The writing within Weaving Liberation required I trust my community, be known and vulnerable, and leave my own comfort zones. Prior to the escalation of genocide, I deferred to other people, and saw care work as the primary way I contributed to liberatory worlds. That is still a primary way I use my body, but writing the pieces within the chapbook really challenged me to see the skill of writing as one that could be harnessed for liberation. The writing connected my body to both the Indigenous people of the land I’m on and to Palestinians fighting for liberation.

The chapbook’s writing was all created through relationship: no one protests, or writes, alone. I had the great fortune of organizing with beloveds and new friends, of being challenged and encouraged, of receiving loving feedback and integrating the wisdom of people who look at the world differently, of organizing around the multiplicity of needs within my community of neurodivergent and disabled queer and trans beloveds.

Mike: You write about transness as something borderless rather than fixed or individual. How did your experiences with community shape that understanding of gender?

M. K.: I’ll simply quote my friend Nikita here, who once said, “Loving trans people makes you more trans.” It’s true! I love trans people and we make each other, and those we love, more trans. An infinite loop that has no borders.

Mike: And lastly, where do you envision your work going in the future and how might Weaving Liberation impact that trajectory?

M. K.: I recently finished a manuscript for a poetry collection, which I’m submitting to publishers. In some ways, it’s related to Weaving Liberation, in that some of these poems archive the relationship between myself and my friend Mayar as she survives the immense cruelties perpetrated by the zionist entity. It also explores complicity in cruelty, in my work as an ICU nurse, and themes of death, care, and worldbuilding.

I have two fledgling projects in the work, too, which I won’t say too much about here. One is directly related to the essay collection coming out this summer, The Sexuality of Care: On Nursing, Kink, and a Future Without Hospitals, and the other is pure kink. Still very unclear which one will take priority—a book project takes years!

For the time being, I’m excited for The Sexuality of Care to get in the hands of readers, and to have more nuanced conversations about care, violence, liberation, and building a world worth fighting for.

About the Author

M. K. Thekkumkattil is a trans, disabled, kinky writer and nurse whose liberation is bound up with Palestinian liberation. They have received support from SmokeLong Quarterly, Tin House, Queer Art Mentorship, Lambda Literary, VONA, and Writing by Writers. They are the author of the essay collection "The Sexuality of Care: On Nursing, Kink, and a Future Without Hospitals," and the chapbook "Weaving Liberation: An Archival Chapbook." Their work can also be found in Black Warrior Review, smoke and mold, ___figuration, Year Round Queer, and In the Future There Are No Hospitals.

About the Interviewer

Michael Zendejas (he/him) received a Fiction MFA at UMass Amherst. He runs the film blog, The Chicano Film Shelf, and was an inaugural recipient of the Rose Fellowship, a Juniper Fellow, a 2022 winner of the James W. Foley Memorial Prize and was in the inaugural cohort of the Emerging Writers Fellowship. He consults and teaches classes on Fiction, Poetry and Screenwriting via GrubStreet. His work is featured or forthcoming in: Stanchion, North American Review, Unstamatic, Five2One Magazine and elsewhere. He's currently working on a novel!

Grab your copy here!

Our first ever full length title CHABÓCHI DOLL by féi iká shumarí is now sold everywhere!!! Please support indie presses and make sure to get your copy directly from us, or, ask your local libraries to stock this incredible book of essays!

CHABÓCHI DOLL is the trans homegirl that keeps it real and doesn’t fear cracking citizenship by the neck.

Part auto-fiction, part manifesto, féi iká shumarí’s CHABÓCHI DOLL snaps the present moment in America tainted by the persecution of undocumented and native bodies, extensive trans legislation seeking to seize the livelihood of trans people, all while negotiating the radicalness of her joy and two-spirited embodiment, when confronted with a brain tumor diagnosis.

With laughable sass, switchblade precision, and exquisite analysis, these coming-of-age-at-thirty essays turn womanhood, citizenship, and disability on their head. From a confrontation with TSA to sexual escapades with Ethical Fuckboys, these essays weave us through the multi-layered reality of a woman unwilling to surrender. Whether it’s critiquing the faulty strategies of citizen activists or differentiating a drag queen from a trans woman, shumarí does it with exquisite generosity, fists squared up, and a whole lot of eye rolling.

PRAISE FOR CHABÓCHI DOLL

“CHABÓCHI DOLL troubles the topography of womanhood through Trans Possibility & Undocumented archive making. Her essays are delightfully ‘long-winded interrogations’ & ‘anthropological approach to discovering what trauma still plagues’ feels more conversational than calculated. Confrontation wears lipstick. Indigeneity sings in primary hues. Narrative is collaged to frame the realities of the world. The world is ‘brighter & sweeter’ with féi iká shumarí existing in her nuance.”
—Jzl Jmz, Local Woman

“CHABÓCHI DOLL models literary self-love and community care. With this book, féi iká shumari has gifted us good medicine.”
—Myriam Gurba, Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings

“With sensuous lyricism, CHABÓCHI DOLL reckons with womanhood, theorizes the 2020s fuckboy, troubles the ghosts of statehood, and keeps going further. féi iká shumarí’s luminescent voice is both breezy and biting as she invites readers into soft imaginaries only to check your reality and ‘facilitate your undoing.’ I am undone.”
—Benedict Nguyễn, Hot Girls with Balls

Buy your copy here!

DEADLINE EXTENDED: QTBIPOC Book Award Prize

The deadline is now extended until July 15th, 2026. Thank you to everyone who has submitted and we can't wait to read your submissions!

For our first ever full-length fiction prize, Abode Press is looking to acquire fiction short story collections or novels written by people of color who are queer and/or trans. We want work that is voice driven, sparks social change, reminds us of home, and defies genre. We are especially interested in works that are haunting, that have a strong sense of place, that are queer, radical, and genre defiant. Some of the editorial teams favorite authors who do this remarkably well are Octavia Butler, Mariana Enriquez, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, and Rivers Solomon. We also love when work is inspired from theorists, such as Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman.

The book award fiction prize is open until June 30th. We cannot wait to read your work. Guidelines and submission info here!

PREORDER: How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse

Pre orders are officially open for our next poetry chapbook title: How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse by Osmani R. Ochoa!

For readers who carry deep political conviction, live with chronic illness, or know the ache of loss and longing, How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse is a poetry chapbook that offers an intimate meditation on being human, and how breath—and breathlessness—reminds us that we are alive.

Praise for How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse

“In How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse, Ochoa masterfully merges violence, love, the physical body, and the earth into an undeniable crisis of breath. At the center of these poems is resistance against the future of this planet and of the speaker’s body—how amidst all this destruction there is love. Throughout these pages, we inhale and exhale history, borders, desire, and fire as each page is a leap into the next moment where every ‘Birth of a new ending / I was resurrected again.’ These poems remind us that where we begin and end are at the heart of survival.”

—Saúl Hernández, How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024)

“Órale. From Hernán Cortes to Hurricane Harvey, from Los Bukis to Primer Impacto, brace for the first impact of Osmani R. Ochoa’s brilliant translingual debut. With heart-wrenching depth and ingenious humor, these poems are a gorgeous blend of pop culture nostalgia and luminous futurist gadgetry. This is a world where traditional remedios like copal and lemongrass coexist with lung bio USB chips and nano-inhalers. There is hope and healing here para nuestra gente. Adelante, Osmani.”

—Violeta Garza, Brava (First Matter Press, 2025)

“Ochoa’s poems take us through landscapes of survival, resistance, and hope. Each poem aches and yearns for the promise of full and unhindered breath as only someone who knows this battle can. The collection explores the connections between outer and inner existence, between bodies, souls, land, and the external forces that seek to suffocate and subjugate life. The possibility of a new dream and a new reality are bolstered by the bonds of family, love, and community.”

—César L. De León, Speaking with Grackles by Soapberry Trees (FlowerSong, 2021)

Preorder your copy here!

We Open for Chapbook Submissions on August 15th!

We open for our chapbook submission prize on August 15th! We will be accepting poetry chapbooks up to 30 pages and hybrid chapbooks up to 40 pages. We look forward to reading your submissions and thank you for sending your work to us!

Learn more about our chapbook prize here: Submissions | Abode Press

SAY HELLO TO OUR NEW SENIOR POETRY ACQUISITIONS EDITOR

We are so excited to welcome Isaac Salazar, who will be stepping into the Senior Poetry Acquisitions editor role after SG Huerta who is passing on the torch and did an incredible job leading the poetry section since our inception in 2023. We will miss SG dearly and wish them the best in their future endeavors, and we are incredibly excited to welcome Isaac into this new role, who has been with us since 2023. Isaac first started out as a Poetry Reader and was promoted to Assistant Poetry Editor, and is now Senior Poetry Acquisitions Editor. Congratulations, Isaac!

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to acknowledge accomplishments in the Abode Press family.

• Teri Vela’s microchap Triforce Sonnets is out today with fifthwheelpress for their Pride series.

• August Chun has a piece in Prism Reports.

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

Book Description: Coral in The Diaspora by Jerrice J. Baptiste is a prose chapbook collection that captures the lives of the Haitian people as they embrace the goodness in their community. It celebrates the wisdom of the elders as leaders who are cherished for their commitment to help the island thrive. Each member of the island's community is welcomed and valued for their special gifts and the joy they each create by being unique souls. Coral in The Diaspora creates a visceral experience for its readers through its colorful imagery and beautiful language by giving voice to the island of Haiti.

The book carries a variety of beautiful, individual fragments: red seeds of the pomegranate (“Pomegranates,” p.14), yellow corn (“Le Maïs,” p.18), blue or white headscarves (“The Sacred Wash,” p. 21), cacao (“Secret Ingredient,” p.19) pink rosary beads (“Alchemy,” p.29), and this is part of where I get a sense of the coral from the title Coral In The Diaspora. Can you speak to why the title names coral specifically? I don’t think the word appears elsewhere in the book.

The wonderful title of the book refers to the lifestyle, objects and concepts that are the backbone of Haitian culture, for example selling food, sharing food in community, prayer and caring for the land. Haitians from all over the world, at home in Haiti and in the diaspora are the backbone of Haiti and our belief systems are generated from the culture and from our celebrated traditions too. These beautiful things keep us connected to our native land no matter where we live.

Most pieces in the book also carry a chorus of relationality. Fathers, mothers, children, abound in this book. Even when no other person is in the scene, the great grandmother in “Eating Below Stars” has her favorite donkey Zig with her, and their interactions are as careful and tender as any other in this book (p.16). Can you tell us about your literary community, your literary ancestors, and who you were thinking about when writing this book?

When I was writing the book I was in awe of the stories that birthed through me. I realized that the ancestral ties were strong. I remembered the stories that I had heard about my own great-great-grandmother and they were simple, but powerful with meaning because they spoke loudly about how Haitians respected and revered the elders, and how the elders guided the community. I was also thinking strongly about my great-grandfather Laurore who was a cherished Baptist minister who left such a great impression on all of us in our lineage. He was a fascinating elder who kept his children and grandchildren connected by faith and he was an example of how to shine our light in the world.

Can you tell us about ritual and tradition in this book? In “How to Eat a Haitian Mango” (p.15) there is the “sacred moment” of biting a hole into a ripe mango to suck out the juice, and then there is also the grooming afterward, where Emile licks the mango off her fingers. To close the book, we get a vision of one sister braiding another sister’s hair into cornrows before birth (“Our Tradition,” p.33). Tell us how ritual & tradition function within the everyday happenings of this book.

Daily rituals and traditions make up the totality of Coral in the Diaspora. They show the tender and caring ways the characters help each other. And how each simple task such as washing clothes near the waterfall or biting the top part of the mango to enjoy its juice or braiding the hair of the pregnant woman before giving birth brings the reader into the experience. They are each valued from the early morning until the late evening, the characters are living their lives with consciousness no matter how small or how big. Each one plays an important role in keeping the rituals and traditions ongoing from generation to generation.

The book begins with a child born, and ends with an impending birth, while the rest of the book doesn’t have “epiphanies” so much as it carries the epiphanies of everyday life. Can you tell us about your sense of the mundane versus the extraordinary, and what relationship those concepts have, if any, in Coral in The Diaspora?

The magic that is created in Coral in the Diaspora begins with Great-grandmother welcoming a newborn at birth and the book closes with a character getting ready to give birth. I felt that the eldest woman being present at each birth on the island to be a unique experience and tradition, and the woman being cared for before and after birth to be significant as well. As much as there are some mundane daily activities taking place in the book they do become extraordinary moments because each person performs each task with such presence and joy. The mundane acts leave the reader with a heartfelt feeling as if the reader had participated as well. The book creates such wonderful sensory moments as one reads. I’ve been told by readers that reading the book makes them feel like they were a member on the island and I placed them directly into the scene. There’s no greater compliment than that I could have received for Coral in the Diaspora.

Can you tell us about home in this book? The word “diaspora” in the title suggests that the relationship between the speaker or writer and home is one of distance—one writing of home from a distance, from elsewhere. Tell us what writing about Haiti in this book does for your own understanding of home.

When I left Haiti my native home and immigrated to the USA, I felt that I took that a piece of my country with me in my heart. No matter where I lived, my experiences make me feel like Haiti will always be my home and I carry that love within me. Yes, I’m a member in the diaspora and all I have are my memories of my homeland and they sustain me and keep me connected to the land of my birth. I think this book makes me feel even closer to Haiti even more so than before. I just want to share those memories with everyone through my writing.

About the Author

Jerrice J Baptiste is a visual artist, poet, author of nine books. Coral in The Diaspora is published by Abode Press. She’s been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and as Best of The Net. Her poetry has been published in Artemis Journal, The Write Launch, The Banyan Review, The Yale Review, and others. Her watercolor drawings are published in MER, Spirit Fire Review, and others. Jerrice has presented her poetry and art work at The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. She’s been featured twice as solo artist in 2025 & 2026 at The Mountaintop Library in Tannersville, NY.

About the Interviewer

Teri Vela (she/her) is a queer Latina poet, mother, and former public interest attorney. She is an assistant poetry editor with Split Lip Magazine, a reader with Abode Press, and a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems can be found in Puerto Del Sol, Shenandoah Literary Magazine, Villain Era and more. Teri stands in solidarity with the liberation of Palestine and of all oppressed peoples.

There are only eleven copies left of Coral in the Diaspora. Grab your copy here!

Pre orders are officially open for our FIRST EVER FULL LENGTH title: CHABÓCHI DOLL by féi iká shumarí! Grab your copy here!

CHABÓCHI DOLL is the trans homegirl that keeps it real and doesn’t fear cracking citizenship by the neck.

Part auto-fiction, part manifesto, féi iká shumarí’s CHABÓCHI DOLL snaps the present moment in America tainted by the persecution of undocumented and native bodies, extensive trans legislation seeking to seize the livelihood of trans people, all while negotiating the radicalness of her joy and two-spirited embodiment, when confronted with a brain tumor diagnosis.

With laughable sass, switchblade precision, and exquisite analysis, these coming-of-age-at-thirty essays turn womanhood, citizenship, and disability on their head. From a confrontation with TSA to sexual escapades with Ethical Fuckboys, these essays weave us through the multi-layered reality of a woman unwilling to surrender. Whether it’s critiquing the faulty strategies of citizen activists or differentiating a drag queen from a trans woman, shumarí does it with exquisite generosity, fists squared up, and a whole lot of eye rolling.

PRAISE FOR CHABÓCHI DOLL

“CHABÓCHI DOLL troubles the topography of womanhood through Trans Possibility & Undocumented archive making. Her essays are delightfully ‘long-winded interrogations’ & ‘anthropological approach to discovering what trauma still plagues’ feels more conversational than calculated. Confrontation wears lipstick. Indigeneity sings in primary hues. Narrative is collaged to frame the realities of the world. The world is ‘brighter & sweeter’ with féi iká shumarí existing in her nuance.”
—Jzl Jmz, Local Woman

“CHABÓCHI DOLL models literary self-love and community care. With this book, féi iká shumari has gifted us good medicine.”
—Myriam Gurba, Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings

“With sensuous lyricism, CHABÓCHI DOLL reckons with womanhood, theorizes the 2020s fuckboy, troubles the ghosts of statehood, and keeps going further. féi iká shumarí’s luminescent voice is both breezy and biting as she invites readers into soft imaginaries only to check your reality and ‘facilitate your undoing.’ I am undone.”
—Benedict Nguyễn, Hot Girls with Balls

Releasing July 1, 2026. Preorder your copy here!

DEADLINE EXTENDED: Book Award Fiction Prize for QTBIPOC Writers!

The deadline is now extended until June 30th, 2026. Thank you to everyone who has submitted and we can't wait to read your submissions!

For our first ever full-length fiction prize, Abode Press is looking to acquire fiction short story collections or novels written by people of color who are queer and/or trans. We want work that is voice driven, sparks social change, reminds us of home, and defies genre. We are especially interested in works that are haunting, that have a strong sense of place, that are queer, radical, and genre defiant. Some of the editorial teams favorite authors who do this remarkably well are Octavia Butler, Mariana Enriquez, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, and Rivers Solomon. We also love when work is inspired from theorists, such as Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman.

The book award fiction prize is open until June 30th. We cannot wait to read your work. Guidelines and submission info here!

VIRTUAL RETREAT ALL ACCESS LECTURE PASS

Starting June 5th, we are welcoming nearly 60 writers to our Virtual Retreat program, who will have access to 2 to 3 craft talks, panels, and seminars all month long.

Unlock the full experience of the 2026 Abode Press Virtual Retreat with our All Access Lecture Pass — your invitation to every lecture, craft talk, panel, open mic, and special event throughout the retreat for non-enrolled participants. This pass gives you exclusive access to an unforgettable lineup of visionary presenters, award-winning authors, and transformative conversations centered on craft, creativity, justice, performance, publishing, and community building.

View a sneak peek of all descriptions of events here.

With your pass, you’ll attend live virtual sessions featuring:

• Ariana Brown

• Saúl Hernández

• Camille U. Adams

• Annell López

• Benedict Nguyễn

• Aimée Okotie-Oyekan & Rasheena Fountain

• Luc Le

• Jazz Bell

• Icess Fernandez Rojas

• Aerik Francis, Noel Quiñones, Jessica Nirvana Ram, Danielle Toosie-Watson

• mónica teresa ortiz, Maya Salameh, Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi, Ashia Ajani

Explore sessions on spoken word and performance poetry, revision, postmemory and diaspora, disability justice, anti-imperialist poetics, liminal writing, environmental storytelling, publishing community, and more.

What’s Included:

• Zoom links to all virtual retreat lectures, panels, seminars, and craft talks

• A Google Drive folder with all recordings to all sessions for up to 60 days after 6/28

• Four community open mic nights

• Closed captioning for accessibility

• A chance to connect with an inspiring community of writers and artists

Join us for a month of creativity, conversation, and transformative writing experiences! Passes can be bought here!

WELCOME OUR VIRTUAL RETREAT COHORTS

We are excited to welcome five cohorts of talented writers to study under Ariana Brown (Poetry), Saúl Hernández (Poetry), Camille U. Adams (Nonfiction), Annell López (Short Fiction), and Benedict Nguyễn (Novel).

Welcome us in congratulating our fellows below!

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to acknowledge accomplishments in the Abode Press family.

• Our Founder, Diamond Braxton, is the 2026 Residency Fellow for the Black and/or Indigenous Writers for SAFTA!

• Christina Anne Guieb Brown graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Writing.

• Angela Heiser has a poem in Clackamas Literary Review.

• Divine Byrd was offered a Virginia Center for the Creative Art’s Residency.

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

Deadline is May 31st!

For our first ever full length fiction prize, Abode Press is looking to acquire fiction short story collections or novels written by people of color who are queer and/or trans. We want work that is voice driven, sparks social change, reminds us of home, and defies genre. We are especially interested in works that are haunting, that have a strong sense of place, that are queer, radical, and genre defiant. Some of the editorial teams favorite authors who do this remarkably well are Octavia Butler, Mariana Enriquez, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, and Rivers Solomon. We also love when work is inspired from theorists, such as Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman.

The book award fiction prize is open until May 31st. We cannot wait to read your work. Guidelines and submission info here!

PRIZE DETAILS

- 1000 cash prize

- 25 author copies

- Standard book contract

- Professional marketing and publicity

- Work with an indie press and a small team who will champion your work!

May Virtual Workshop: The Word, the Bow, & the Arrow

May 16, 2026, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM CDT | Virtual Workshop

About the event

Workshop Description: June Jordan said, “I still do not recognize a necessary conflict between the sonnet and the bow & arrow.” This workshop asks: How might the poem and the bow & arrow nod to one another with recognition? Where do poetry and action meet? What gives poetry, in particular, the power to be dangerous, to stir our readers to revolutionary action? In this 2-hour generative workshop we will consider the possibilities of inciting action through language and walk through the mud of no-easy-answers together.

About the Presenter: Yomalis Rosario (she/her) is a Black Dominican poet who was born and raised in Washington Heights, NYC. She is a graduate of the 2025 Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program and serves as the Managing Editor for WE THE SOIL. Her work appears or is forthcoming in ROOM Magazine, I Feel Nothing Like Good Anthology, Nimrod, & elsewhere.

Tickets are $25 minimum for general admission and limited $10 tickets for writers-in-need. All proceeds go towards paying our presenters and helping the Press pay for operational expenses. Thank you for your contribution to help keep an indie intersectional press afloat! Get your tickets here!

Apply for Our Book Reviewer Program!

Abode Press is seeking thoughtful reviewers for upcoming titles. Applicants will be asked to complete a short form to help determine eligibility for the program. While a limited number of physical copies are available, digital galleys are strongly encouraged due to small print runs. *Please note that physical books can only be shipped within the United States, as our titles are distributed domestically. International applicants are welcome to request digital galleys but must demonstrate how they will reach U.S. audiences who can purchase print editions. Ideal reviewers are aligned with the types of work we publish, have experience reviewing books or a clear plan for doing so, and bring an intentional approach to their reviews.

Apply for the program here.

Welcome Our New Programs Manager, Ravneet Sandhu & Our Publicity Manager, Angela Heiser!

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to acknowledge accomplishments in the Abode Press family.

• Marilyn Ramírez has a poem coming out in Rip Rap's 75th issue.

• Ravneet Sandhu has a poem out with Tiny Spoon Magazine for their Translation issue. She also has a prose poem coming out with Oreades Press on May 16th for their Earth anthology.

• Teri Vela has a poem coming out in Puerto Del Sol’s Spring issue and a sequence of sonnets, Triforce Sonnets, coming out with Fifth Wheel Press for their pride micro-chapbook series. Out on June 18!

• Divine Byrd was offered a Vermont Studio Center Writer’s Residency.

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

In this newsletter feature, Devi spends time reflecting on their chapbook, their process behind writing Earth and Earth-like Planets, and more! Keep reading to hear from the author themself!

Devaki D. Devi is a queer Indian American author and journalist currently surviving severe myalgic encephalomyelitis. Their writing often showcases the emotional landscape of childhood; observations sharpened by their years of experience teaching. Devaki is a Tin House writer’s workshop participant with a BA in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley. They are a Pushcart prize nominee, and more of their work can be found in The Dawn Review, Barren Magazine, and The Roadrunner Review.

From Devaki D. Devi on Earth and Earth-like Planets

When my parents came to America, we shifted rapidly between states – Indiana, Colorado, Missouri, till we finally ended up in the Bay Area when I was about three years old. I grew up, therefore, in some degree of cultural and racial privilege, because I was never technically lonely. Every single one of my neighbors was Indian. I had many Indian classmates who I saw as a second family when home was unsafe or scary. There was an Indian grocery store right across my street, where on weekends you could even line up for sugarcane juice. All around me, there was always familiarity to grasp. I never considered my apartment the bounds of my home. It flowered easily outside of it as long as I’d ever known myself.

That being said, I often felt lonely within it anyway. I see people in the diaspora talking about it a lot – the difficulty of being Indian and an artist, of being Indian and being queer, of being Indian and being neurodivergent, disabled – of being Indian and anything “outside the norm.” These were vague feelings that followed me too, before I could ever put them to words. The crushing paradox between my need for bonding with the most fundamental and intimate part of myself, and this inexplicable wall which separated me from it. After all, why did these differences make me feel at odds with my home, and my identity? It wasn’t as though they were opposites.

As I grew to love literature and sociology in college, this particular question was the one I kept circling back to. Why this block?

I read countless papers about queer and trans Indian identity before colonialism. Numerous times I was presented with the old story of the gender non-conforming characters which were censored from religious texts. The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee went on to describe how the model minority stereotype was meant to glamorize America during the cold war. After the double onslaught of British colonialism with its long, violent censorship and American imperialism’s economic exploitation and manufactured cultural flattening, a fenced-off story arose about Indian Americans. Due in part to its “flattering” nature, it ended up being absorbed as if it were our own, leaving Indians outside of the normative productive sphere alienated from their culture’s own mythos. But it never was ours to begin with.

Indian fiction which prods at the western world’s cultural perceptions does exist already, which I know since it was something I desperately searched for. The Truth About Me by A. Revati and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhuti Roy presented to me both biographical and realistic fiction surrounding being an Indian trans woman, the hijra identity. The Sea Elephants by Shastri Akella, Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy and Quarantine by Rahul Mehta all looked at the experience of Indian gay men, both in mainland and diaspora. All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews followed a diaspora Indian’s lesbian identity. The work was there, and I’ve leaned on it through my young adult life. But the weight in my chest remained where it was until I began writing my own stories, and joining the fence-breakers.

So what is my story? As I’ve said, I grew up in the Bay Area surrounded by other Indians. I’ve felt both moments of community and moments of alienation within it. I’m queer, I’m severely chronically ill, bedbound and unable to work. My parents are divorced, and I grew up with a lower income than many of my peers, never owning a house and living the majority of childhood without a working car. But in many ways there was that privileged integration for me as well – a higher caste family, both my parents holding a higher education degree, the expectations around my future, and of course, growing up somewhere like the bay. In this sense I would both bond and split from the Indian Americans I was around, relating and not-relating hundreds of times within one conversation.

I decided I didn’t necessarily want to write about identity in the sense of contrast and clash. I didn’t want to argue – I wanted to widen. In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, he writes about how novels themselves played a critical part in building the concept of nationhood, which was really just a set of imagined community members joined by certain histories, geography and traditions. From the seed of this concept, I thought about writing my own sense of community, thus widening the concept of diasporic Indian nationhood to all that it meant to me and my friends who currently didn’t feel we were imagined with it.

This, to me, meant infusing my pieces with all the memories of places where I’ve felt whole and seen – bonding with other Indians who have felt left out, different, others who’ve struggled with being accepted. Late night conversations in school when I was a kid. Open mics I went to as an adult. An organization called Parivar, named after the hijra tradition of making one’s own family, where queer desis came together to celebrate events. I wanted this to be the central pulse, the heart of which I would describe as a kind of “freedom dreaming,” a concept theorized by D.G. Kelley. Freedom dreaming is essentially the process of looking at our lives and deciding both what we want to change, but also what we want to keep. The moments of clarity, wholeness, and home I’ve felt in being Indian nearly always included an incidence of that dreaming – a celebration of culture as it is now, but also an embrace of queerness. A love for our parents, but also a defiance towards their restrictive expectations. An understanding of sacrifice and privilege, but also a resistance to capitalism and soulless wealth accumulation. As a whole, Earth & Earth-like Planets was borne out of these glimmering moments of clarity within such tensions. While it was being written, the collection was an attempt at describing my home while simultaneously creating it.

One central question I had as I wrote through these stories was how I was going to represent the Indian American experience on a basic level as I worked through these storylines of defiance. At a certain writer’s meetup, I once had a white author ask me “what makes your characters or stories Indian?” At the time I simply answered “their names,” because the answer felt too complicated to outline conversationally.

The reality is the Indian identity is astoundingly diverse, the Indian American identity perhaps even more so. My bond towards other desis has always been through recognizing each other’s faces across a room, or seeing each other’s names on a roster. Beyond that, so much is different. There are so many different languages – Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati (my own), Hindi, Marathi, the list goes on. There are many different religions too, between Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and within those too there are branches. I’m reminded here of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay, Is There an Indian Way Of Thinking? The answer essentially being that India, being so unfathomably diverse, does have an Indian way of thinking, which is specificity – the rejection of universality due to the sheer impossibility for such a concept to reside there.

But I would go on to argue here that in America this reality changes a little. There is a bond we experience in the similar way we are othered and the similar ways we push back. Even when I talk to Indians with an entirely different background to mine, I notice that essence is there. Counterintuitively the imposed hegemony brings us together. Anne Anling Cheng writes about how racial identity can sometimes become the grounds for “both progress and discrimination,” in The Melancholy of Race. It became very easy to stress about how I was representing being Indian American, which was why I decided to go about it in the most honest, archival way I could – one that didn’t flatten or universalize, exoticize or over-integrate, because it was simply true.

If I were to describe how Indian culture appeared in my life, I would describe it as an atmosphere: something which follows and breathes life into me, but isn’t always visible. Let me describe it this way: I don’t know Gujarati per se. I’ve long forgotten it. But last year, when I had a medical event and fell into a semi-coma, I experienced a sudden loss of English, where I could only recall Gujarati words. Everything I experience goes through the filter of my home, my family, how I was raised, and what I’ve chosen to retain from that way. Subtle things, like the cadence of my internal monologue, the balance of spirituality with rationality, or the things I like to eat. Larger things, like to treat my friends as family. An atmosphere is an undetectable thing day to day, but it’s also what keeps us alive. Its composition determines what a planet will harbor, and also determines how it’ll be perceived by an external observer. An atmosphere can be all this while all the proof we have of it up front is the blue of the sky, like all the proof I have up front is a name and a face. But there’s so much more than that.

In my stories, I represented the Indian American identity carefully, in a couple ways. I incorporated traditions which me and my own friends have joked about, and been very familiar with: superstitions about when to wash our hair, cut our nails, go outside. I mentioned homemade food, tea, biscuits, but not with any particular centrality. I thought about the expectations me and my community have grieved over – patriarchal ones, academic ones, unspoken ones, capitalist ones. I thought about subtle things, like long hair and braids, like easily forgotten house decorations like torans. I thought about cadence and the prominence of fables in our childhood, and weaved in many animals and a rhythm which followed the sound of Indian stories I read as a kid. I used certain expressions which came from specific tendencies of translation, because it came to me more naturally than a fully Americanized English. I used a diversity of names and gave my characters a diversity of faiths, because my friends and community have never been a monolith. And all of this is still only to the side, only the soft, corner-of-my-eye experience of identity. What is actually central is the character’s struggles against what the book itself is struggling against.

These stories where Indian girls in America drop out of college because they’d rather pursue art, kids in wheelchairs who lament the oppressive work week, neurodivergent kids who struggle to get along with others, who make worlds in their heads and play with bugs, queer teens with relationships that aren’t working out, with names and identities that aren’t working out, young men who love their families but can’t quite reach them, young women who avoid their families and can’t seem to heal from them. A lot of my own pain flows through these stories. But it isn’t just my own.

When I think of home, of identity and culture, I think of youth. After all, it is the ultimate youth – the most primary iteration of who you are. I wanted to use words and images that evoked the sensation of the past, especially Indian American childhood in the bay, with things like calling cards and silly bands and swimming pools and egg drops and malls. With that sort of whimsical, reminiscent state, combined with the magical realism inspired heavily by K-Ming Chang and Andrew Lam, I wanted to infuse in the narrative the inherent magic of freedom dreaming. I wanted to soften and open up the heart so it may stretch to include new air, new stories, new imaginations. A new atmosphere. And slowly, under this new air, a new planet, with more life.

Come, meet us. There’s more to us than you think.

Earth & Earth-like Planets is now available for purchase. Grab your copy here!

For our first ever full length fiction prize, Abode Press is looking to acquire fiction short story collections or novels written by people of color who are queer and/or trans. We want work that is voice driven, sparks social change, reminds us of home, and defies genre. We are especially interested in works that are haunting, that have a strong sense of place, that are queer, radical, and genre defiant. Some of the editorial teams favorite authors who do this remarkably well are Octavia Butler, Mariana Enriquez, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, and Rivers Solomon. We also love when work is inspired from theorists, such as Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman.

The book award fiction prize is open until May 31st. We cannot wait to read your work. Guidelines and submission info here!

PRIZE DETAILS

- 1000 cash prize

- 25 author copies

- Standard book contract

- Professional marketing and publicity

- Work with an indie press and a small team who will champion your work!

April Virtual Workshop: The Craft of Disruption: Writing the Rupture

Apr 11, 2026, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM CDT | Virtual Workshop

About the event

Workshop Description: The Craft of Disruption / Writing the Rupture invites participants to write from the “breakage”—the place(s) where language trembles under the weight of truth. To write the rupture is to confront what systems, silence, and survival have tried to normalize. It is an act of healing, not because it erases the wound, but because it names it with courage and clarity. Together we will explore how disruption in form and voice can open new pathways to wholeness, how to use language as both surgical tools and salves. This is writing that disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed, that insists art must not only move hearts but move people toward justice. Participants will engage in guided readings, discussion, and generative exercises that turn rupture into revelation—writing that does not flinch, writing that frees.

About the Presenter: Desiree McCray (she/they) entered the world, hailing from Chicago, Illinois. As a womanist scholar, preacher, activist, author, spoken word artist, and writer, she channels her creativity into crafting poetry and scholarly research, delving into themes of race, gender, bodies, class, and the intersection of Black religion, and culture. McCray has released three collections of poems: My Sisters Look Like God: A Womanist Manifesto of Poetry (2024) with Abode Press; Send a Refreshing: Poetic Prayers of an Intercessor (2023) and Hope Among Other Foods: a concoction of fat girl poetry (2020). Their womanist work is forthcoming in Femme Literati: Mixtape Anthology for Black Women Edition Three, “Black Feminist Collective,” “Gal’s Guide Anthology,” and “RAGE Zine.” Desiree McCray graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary, earning a Master of Divinity with a certificate in Black Church Studies in 2021. Ultimately, Desiree McCray provides divine inspiration, spiritual affirmation, and radical transformation through her written and spoken words and by the word of God.

Tickets are $25 minimum for general admission and limited $10 tickets for writers-in-need. All proceeds go towards paying our presenters and helping the Press pay for operational expenses. Thank you for your contribution to help keep an indie intersectional press afloat! Get your tickets here!

Our First-Ever Full-Length Acquisition: CHABÓCHI DOLL

DEAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Acquired by Editor Diamond Braxton, this autofiction book turns the mirror on the present moment in America tainted by the persecution of undocumented and native bodies, extensive trans legislation seeking to seize the livelihood of trans people all while negotiating the radicalness of shumarí’s joy when confronted with a brain tumor diagnosis. Coming Summer 2026.

About the author: féi iká shumarí (b.1993, Chihuahua, Mexico) is a two spirit/trans, (un)documented writer, visual artist, and healer. She is a 2023 Lambda Literary fellow and 2022 Tin House Scholar. féi is the author of HOOD CRIATURA (Sundress Publications, 2020), the forthcoming (UN)DOCU MENTE (Noemi Press, 2025) and CHABÓCHI DOLL (Abode Press, 2026). féi’s poetry/ prose is published in Los Angeles Review of Books, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Hayden Ferry’s Review, Oxford Review of Books, TransLash Media, Somewhere we are Human( Harper Collins, 2022), Here to Stay (Harper Collins, 2024), Split This Rock, F News Magazine, and more. féi is descendent of the Pi’ma, Rarámuri, and Cora peoples. For more of her projects, designs, services and products visit: feiikashumari.com.

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to acknowledge accomplishments in the Abode Press family.

• Sarah Alcaide-Escue has 3 Tolkien-inspired poems forthcoming in the fun and whimsical magazine, Enchanted Living.

• Addie Tsai’s chapbook, tongue withheld, is being published by Harbor Editions in 2027! They also have a poem being published in Grist - A Journal of The Literary Arts.

• Angela Heiser has three translations out at The Poetry Lighthouse.

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

We are delighted to announce our chapbook winners from our 2025 contest. Out of nearly 300 chapbook submissions, we welcome four new authors to our press.

Cassie Holguin-Pettinato - Hybrid Chapbook Winner “Sen time ntality” - coming Spring 2027

• Cassie Holguin-Pettinato Chicana multidisciplinary artist, published poet, and thereminist, from the U.S-Mexico border. She is the author of The Five Stages of Stuttering (FlowerSong Press, 2024), and The Lamb’s Tail (Bottlecap Press, 2022). She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. In 2024, she was awarded the Poet and Author Fellowship at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and in 2025, she traveled to Galway, Ireland, as Artist-in-Residence at Watershed Studios.

  

Jonathan Rowe - Poetry Chapbook Winner “iKhaya-Home” - coming Summer 2027

• Jonathan Rowe is a poet and librarian raised between Boston, Massachusetts, USA (unceded land of the Massachusett people) and Johannesburg, South Africa. He has been published in Callaloo, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and elsewhere, and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Learn more about Jonathan’s work at jonathanrowewrites.com.

  

Rocio Anica - Prose Chapbook Winner “Tiny Joy, Tiny Bane” - coming Fall 2027

• Rocio Anica received her Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Cornell University, where she garnered the Martin Sampson Teaching Award. She volunteers her writing to non-profit organizations and continues her work in education. She is at work on a satirical picaresque. Find her at rocioanica.com.

  

Keishla Rivera-López - Poetry Chapbook Winner - coming Winter 2027

• Keishla Rivera-López is a literary and cultural studies scholar, writer, and poet specializing in Latina/o and Caribbean literature, Latinx Studies, and Puerto Rican Studies with a focus on Latinidad, cultural production, archives, and memory. She received a PhD in American Studies at The Graduate School-Newark at Rutgers University where she was awarded the 2019-2020 Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. Currently, Keishla is a visiting professor in the English Department at Haverford College. Keishla was born and raised in Newark, NJ to Puerto Rican migrants and reflects on what it means to be a child of diaspora in her scholarship and writing. In her free time she enjoys writing poetry, short-stories, plays and essays. Her writing has been published in Centro Journal, Label Me Latina/o Journal, Hispanofila Journal, Chiricu Journal, The Acentos Review, Decolonial Passage, The Newarker, and The Journal for Latina Feminist Criticism.

  

Sign up for: BODY POLITICS: A Poetry Workshop

This generative writing workshop is an invitation to check in with our bodies and consider our bodies alongside our writing. The workshop will begin with an invitation to free write, stretch, and engage in a breathwork session to get us physically and mentally in touch with our bodies. We will then spend the workshop discussing poetry related to themes on body poetics. Loosely defined, “body poetics” is poetry explicitly concerned with bodily existence, features or the whole of the body. These poems ask questions of the body and its relationship to the self, to other beings with bodies, to places and situations. Often, the central question is simply where is the body? Where is the body right now? This workshop space recognizes, welcomes, and embraces the diversity of people's bodies in terms of ability, age, race, gender, class, size, shape.

Aerik Francis is a Queer Black Latinx poet born and based on the lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples currently known as Denver, Colorado, USA. Aerik is currently the poet laureate of Adams County, Colorado. Aerik wants us to come together and gum up the gears of the machinery of the empire toward all of our collective liberation. They are the author of the poetry chapbooks MISEDUCATION (New Delta Re-view, 2023) and BODYPOLITIC (Abode Press in 2026. Find more of their work on their website phaentompoet.com or via social media @phaentompoet.

Tickets are $25 minimum for general admission and limited $10 tickets for writers-in-need. All proceeds go towards paying our presenters and helping the Press pay for operational expenses. Get tickets HERE!

Applications for our 2026 Virtual Summer Retreat close THIS FRIDAY! Apply today!

Starting June 7th, 2026, Abode Press is returning with our virtual retreat experience! With the success of our first retreat, we are coming back bigger and better than ever! We will also have anti-racist workshops available in poetry, fiction, novel, and nonfiction, and attendees will also be able to attend 2-3 craft talks and lectures throughout the week (x2 as much than our first retreat). Workshops will be led by renowned writers, including Ariana Brown (Poetry), Saúl Hernández (Poetry), Benedict Nguyễn (Novel), Annell López (Short Fiction), and Camille U. Adams (Nonfiction).

Most retreat experiences are costly, tending to be upwards to $2000. At Abode, we are working tirelessly to increase accessibility for writers to attend much needed spaces to work on their craft and build connections without compromising their livelihood. This is why the retreat will have an asking price of $325 (sliding scale) with partial scholarships available to writers in need, but because of this low price, applicants will be selected based off the strength of their application and alignment with our press.

It’s free to apply! Apply here: Abode Press Submission Manager

Our First-Ever Full Length Prose Prize Opens March 15th!

We are excited to announce that our first ever full-length fiction prose prize will open on March 15th and close May 15th in Submittable. We are looking for fiction novels or short story collections written by people of color who identify as queer and/or trans. We are interested in works that discuss themes of home, defy genre, and have a strong sense of place. Keep an eye on our submissions page for more information (the page will launch on Monday, March 9th!)

Guidelines: Manuscript samples should be 50 pages or less, in Times New Roman, and double spaced. The artist statement should describe how the manuscript aligns with Abode’s commitments to anti-racist and intersectional work and tie in our interests in themes of “home, identity, origin, and culture.” We are especially interested in works that are haunting, that have a strong sense of place, that are queer, radical, and genre-defiant. Some of our editors favorite books and inspirations are Toni Morrison, Mariana Enriquez, Octavia Butler.

The Editorial Team for full lengths will be spearheaded by Senior Editors, Diamond Braxton and Addie Tsai; Editorial Assistant, Marilyn Ramirez; and Editorial Interns, Teri Vela, Sarah Alcaide Escue, and Christina Anne Brown.

We can’t wait to read your submissions!

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to acknowledge accomplishments in the Abode Press family.

• Jakob Johnson was a scholar for the McCormack Writing Center’s (formerly Tin House) Winter Online Workshop.

• Angela Heiser has two poems in the forthcoming Dead of Winter anthology from Milk and Cake Press.

• Sarah Alcaide-Escue’s manuscript was a finalist for the Fence Books’ Modern Poets Series Prize.

• Ravneet Sandhu has a poem out at Chainmail poetry

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

Happy Black History Month.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge the moment we are living in and what it means to be a publisher during a global rise in fascism and senseless violence, both domestically and abroad. As we continue to bear witness to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo, alongside the horrific domestic terror carried out by ICE, there is no denying that no matter where we turn, violence has seeped into every crack in our lives. It is relentless, immeasurable, and deeply wounding. I feel it every day in my body. A pain that cannot be fully named but that I know many of us are carrying collectively.

It is no surprise, then, that this violence has also permeated the publishing industry, an industry already shaped by whiteness, heteronormativity, and traditional expectations for writing. Publishers and agents are increasingly retreating from writers with marginalized identities, particularly LGBTQ+ writers, and especially trans/queer writers of color. This retreat may not surprise me, but it does demand something of us. It calls on publishers like ours—and others in alignment—to step forward rather than shrink back.

When I founded Abode Press back in 2023, it was in direct response to the wave of book bans that began in 2022 that continued to spread across the country. Watching my own school district ban books that young people deserve access to made clear the urgency of creating a new home for work that would otherwise be silenced. I wanted to build a publishing space that would not abandon vital voices in the face of political pressure.

I want to affirm something to our readers and community: we are not backing away. We remain deeply committed to publishing the voices we have always championed, and we are actively imagining new ways to uplift writers whose work aligns with our anti-racist, anti-colonial, and intersectional values.

With that commitment, I am proud to share that we will soon be announcing our first full-length call for fiction manuscripts, including short story collections and novels. This submission call will only be open to trans/queer writers of color. This call is an intentional act: to champion voices that deserve to be amplified and to state clearly that we are a publisher unafraid to support work that matters, that has literary merit, that has power.

More details about our editorial vision, the publication prize, and submission guidelines will be released on March 1st.

There is more I want to say, and I will, with time. For now, I ask that if you have the means, please consider donating to the organizations listed below, whose collective work continues to resist injustice and sustain our communities. In addition, we encourage you to research mutual aid funds for immigrants who have been wrongfully detained by ICE. We will also be donating portions of funds made from our workshops to support these organizations and the necessary work they are doing.

The Sameer Project (Donations to supply aid to displaced families in Gaza)

Sudan Solidarity Collective (Donations for Sudan solidarity fund)

Inside Books Project (Sends free books and educational materials to prisoners in Texas)

With care,

Diamond Braxton

Founder of Abode Press

Congratulations to Our Incredible 2026-2027 Chapbook Shortlist!

We received a total of 226 chapbook submissions from our recent reading period and were able to accept 4 stellar chapbooks. Congratulations to our chapbook winners! We will announce our winners in a special Substack post in the next two weeks, but we want to take this time to congratulate our authors who were shortlisted! While we couldn’t accept their work, we want to shout them out because we believe in them and the work they’ve created. We receive such strong work during our submission periods and wish we could accept everything. Congratulations to our Shortlisted Authors!

Pre-order BODYPOLITIC by Aerik Francis (releases March 1st!)

If radical means to the root, radical politics must attend to the body.

Written for the vast spectrum of bodies, Aerik Francis’s BODYPOLITIC offers poetry as a catalyst: for movement, for empowerment, and for liberation-minded education rooted in global awareness and local action. This collection of poems questions what it means to live fully inside one’s own body in a society that seeks to regulate, define, or erase bodies. These poems ask readers to reexamine their relationship with their bodies as an act of self-knowledge, resistance, and radical permission to express oneself. Beyond the individual self, BODYPOLITIC also explores how bodies exist within larger bodies of power. Embedded in the history of these political processes are people, Francis’s people, the vast history of peoples fighting against oppressive powers and systems. BODYPOLITIC opens space for a candid conversation with ourselves about what we want, who we are becoming, and who we really want to be.

Aerik Francis is a Queer Black Latinx poet born and based on the lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples currently known as Denver, Colorado, USA. Aerik is currently the poet laureate of Adams County, Colorado. Aerik wants us to come together and gum up the gears of the machinery of the empire toward all of our collective liberation. Their poetry chapbook MISEDUCATION (New Delta Review, 2023) can be purchased online or in person, and their newest poetry chapbook BODYPOLITIC out now with Abode Press in 2026. Find more of their work on their website phaentompoet.com or via social media @phaentompoet.

All books will be shipped by early March! Pre-order your copy here: BODYPOLITIC by Aerik Francis | Abode Press

Sign up for Our February Queer Writing Workshop “FEAR/DESIRE” By Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

In FEAR/DESIRE, we'll write scary AND sexy stories to tell in the dark. This generative workshop is all about considering the (queer) erotic potential of horror. Let's get weird, spooky, and hot. Through short readings, discussions, and generative prompts meant to pry open the intersecting themes of FEAR and DESIRE, we'll create new work that challenges, subverts, and interrogates dominant narratives about bodies, sex, the erotic, identity, and relationships. We'll talk about the craft of writing sex as well as of writing horror, and we'll implement these things in real-time with original generative prompts.

Workshop takes place Feb 22nd at 11am. Sign up here: Fear/Desire: Writing Queer Erotic Horror That Subverts | Abode Press

Happy Black History Month! Support Our Authors!

Coral in the Diaspora by Jerrice J. Baptiste

Coral in The Diaspora by Jerrice J. Baptiste is a collection that captures the lives of the Haitian people as they embrace the goodness in their community. It celebrates the wisdom of the elders as leaders who are cherished for their commitment to help the island thrive. Each member of the island's community is welcomed and valued for their special gifts and the joy they each create by being unique souls. Coral in The Diaspora creates a visceral experience for its readers through its colorful imagery and beautiful language by giving voice to the island of Haiti. Buy a copy here!

My Sisters Look Like God: A Womanist Manifesto of Poetry by Desiree McCray

My Sisters Look Like God: A Womanist Manifesto of Poetry embodies a thought-provoking exploration of faith, heritage, self-acceptance, and identity. This collection celebrates the richness of cultural heritage and boldly embraces themes often overlooked like embracing being unapologetically fat and the intricate legacy of the author's grandmother's faith. The narrative weaves ancestral connections that birth a distinctive perspective on the interconnectedness of the past, present, and future. In My Sisters Look Like God, each title serves to inspire and empower through celebrating cultural heritage. The book beautifully captures the essence of being a black woman navigating the intersectional complexities of identity and faith. This collection of poetry serves an invitation to embrace diversity, challenge preconceptions, and find strength in the embracing one’s unique authenticity. My Sisters Look Like God is not just a book; it's a testimony to the vibrant, vivid vocalizing of rich human experience. Find it here!

Apply for our 2026 Virtual Retreat! Apps close March 7th!

Starting June 7th, 2026, Abode Press is returning with our virtual retreat experience! With the success of our first retreat, we are coming back bigger and better than ever! We will also have anti-racist workshops available in poetry, fiction, novel, and nonfiction, and attendees will also be able to attend 2-3 craft talks and lectures throughout the week (x2 as much than our first retreat). Workshops will be led by renowned writers, including Ariana Brown (Poetry), Saúl Hernández (Poetry), Benedict Nguyễn (Novel), Annell López (Short Fiction), and Camille U. Adams (Nonfiction).

Most retreat experiences are costly, tending to be upwards to $2000. At Abode, we are working tirelessly to increase accessibility for writers to attend much needed spaces to work on their craft and build connections without compromising their livelihood. This is why the retreat will have an asking price of $325 (sliding scale) with partial scholarships available to writers in need, but because of this low price, applicants will be selected based off the strength of their application and alignment with our press.

It’s free to apply! Apply here: Abode Press Submission Manager

Welcome our Grants and Development Manager, Stuti Sharma!

Stuti Sharma is a poet, novelist, music journalist, stand up comic, and line cook born in Nairobi, Kenya and raised in Chicago and the south suburbs. They were an inaugural Tin House Workshop 2023-2024 Reading Fellow. They have work in Hanif Abdurraqib's 68to05.com, Chicago Reader, Sixty Inches from Center, Belt Magazine, Hooligan Magazine, Autostraddle, Commonplace Podcast, and Lupita Nyong'o's podcast with Snap Judgement. She is a collective member at Chicago-based queer and trans printmaking org, Marimacha Monarca Press, which was recipient of the 3Arts and Andy Warhol Fund. She has worked with funding artists through the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events as well as curating the Poetry Foundation's poetry corner in the Chicago Reader. She currently works at the Chicago Public Library and owns an oyster-shucking business called Oysterwallah. She is very excited to be part of the Abode Press team. Stuit is currently going back to school at the University of Illinois-Chicago to finish their bachelor's degree and manuscript. She also produces a bimonthly stand up comedy show in Chicago called Blue Collar Comedy, where she only books comedians from the working class. You can also find her writing at her substack, Kitchen Confit-dential, where she writes about life as a line cook and shares recipes.

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to acknowledge accomplishments in the Abode Press family.

• Hybrid Reader, T.A. Jones, released his first poetry collection, Obsidian Sun. Congratulations, T.A.!

• Hybrid Reader, Crystal Odelle’s story was published in Cobra Milk. Congrats, Crystal!

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

Join Our Full-Length Volunteer Team!

Abode Press is thrilled to announce that we’re expanding to start acquiring full-length prose titles in 2026. We would like to acquire two full-length projects per year and need to bring on more remote volunteers to help us with this exciting new growth at Abode. Please note that all positions are remote, and we are looking to work with people who are based in the U.S. (especially Texas or the South) and embody our values (anti-racism, anti-colonialism, intersectionality, and empathy).

Open Positions:

• The Editorial Assistant is in charge of handling our prose submissions. The Editorial Assistant will assign submissions to our editorial interns, work with our Senior Editor to narrow down final selections, and communicate with authors.

• The Marketing + Sales Manager is in charge of creating our marketing campaigns for each full-length title. This means coming up with special promotional ideas for books, including merch and managing product sales from our website. Marketing + Sales can expect to work closely with the Publicity, Events, and Social Media Department.

• The Grants and Development role will help us scale the organization and acquire more funding so we can offer higher advances and keep the organization sustainable. This person is responsible for managing our yearly fundraiser, securing donors, and more.

Please note that all positions are volunteer-based, though some do come with a small honorarium. For more information about each role, head to the link in our bio. If interested, email your CV/resume and cover letter in the body of the email to info@abodepress.com detailing your interest by December 10th. All qualified applicants will be responded to by early January.

Our Last 2025 Workshop is This Wed, Dec 3rd! Sign up!

Writing with the Earth: An Anti-Imperialism Towards Eco-Poetics Part II

Dec 03, 2025, 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM CST : Virtual Workshop

Workshop Description: Building on the foundation laid in the first workshop, participants will dive deeper into Western imperialism’s impact on the environment and how writers grapple with those impacts in their writings. Reading work by contemporary poets Cianga, Golden, Maya Salameh, this workshop begs the question: how are we to interpret the ecological vulnerability of our time through language, place, history, and emergent knowledge? How can we re-embed ourselves into the natural world, and remind ourselves of our responsibility to it? This layered response allows for a deeper engagement with ecological works and moves beyond the aesthetic/sensorial into ethical and stewardship capacity. Participation in the first workshop is not required.

Ashia Ajani is a sun shower, an overripe nectarine, a carnivorous plant, a glass bead. They are the author of one poetry collection, Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing, 2023), and a forthcoming collection of lyric essays, Tending the Vines (Timber Press, TBA). Her writing is a kaleidoscope of her work as an eco-griot & abolitionist.

Tickets are $25 minimum for general admission and $10 for writers-in-need. All proceeds go towards paying our presenters and helping the Press pay for operational expenses. Thank you for your contribution to help keep an indie intersectional press afloat! Get your tickets here.

Submit a 2026 Writing Workshop Proposal to Us!

What We’re Looking For: We are looking for workshops from writers/leaders that align with our core values: anti-racism, anti-colonialism, intersectionality, and empathy. In addition, we want workshops that amplify marginalized voices to create more representation in the landscape. Since we are currently only able to publish writers who live in the U.S., we are looking for writers based in the U.S. as well to lead our workshops. Abode Press looks for work that focuses on identity, origin, and culture, so any workshops that can tie in these themes will be favorably considered. In addition, we love workshops that take risks, defy genre, and subvert our expectations.

• Who Should Submit a Proposal:

  • We want to work with workshop leaders who align with our mission and values at Abode Press: to uplift underrepresented voices with a commitment to anti-racism, anti-colonialism, intersectionality, empathy. In addition, we want to work with Instructors who are comfortable advertising their workshops because we have noticed an increase in signups when leaders advocate for their workshops in addition to our own marketing initiatives. We especially love to work with Instructors who belong to BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities and/or who are based in the South.

The deadline to submit workshop proposals is 12 pm CST, Monday, January 5th. Submit here!

Find us at the Jones Center rooftop of The Contemporary Austin on Sat, Dec 6th!

We are excited to be tabling as part of a zine and print market taking place Saturday, December 6, 12pm-5pm, at the Jones Center rooftop of The Contemporary Austin. The event is in conjunction with the fall exhibition, which is retrospective of the queer Chicano artist Teddy Sandoval. Stop by and learn about our 2026 programming and grab one of our chapbooks! Learn more about the event here: Zine & Print Market Presented in Collaboration with St. Sucia - The Contemporary Austin.

We Officially Closed for 2025 Chapbook Submissions!

Thank you to everyone who submitted to our Fall 2025 Chapbook period. We received 226 chapbook submissions (a new record!), and our team is hard at work reading through your wonderful submissions. All submitters will receive a response regarding their submission in January.

Congratulations to Our Nominees!!

• CLMP 2025 Firecracker Awards in Poetry

  • We are excited to announce that we have nominated “Sea Changes” by Hayun Cho and “Bilingual Bitch” by Angelica Julia Davila for the 2025 Firecracker Awards. Congratulations to our authors on their nomination!

• Lambda Literary Awards

  • We are thrilled to announce that we have nominated “Weaving Liberation: An Archival Chapbook” by M. K. Thekkumkattil for a Lammy Award in Trans Nonfiction. Congratulations!

• Monarch Queer Literary Awards

  • We are also excited to announce that we have nominated three poems from “Bilingual Bitch” for the Monarch Queer Literary Awards, a new anthology spearheaded by the wonderful people at fifth wheel press. Congratulations!

    Help Us Reach Our Fundraising Goal of Before the End of the Year!!

    

    For this Giving Tuesday, we still need your help to reach $1,000 by the end of this year. We have $630 to raise left. Help us get there so we can continue to amplify marginalized voices amidst a growing effort to silence them! Contributions are tax-deductible and will go towards increasing author payments, operational expenses, and for more literary offerings, including our first-ever full-length publication prize. Your donations will go towards supporting an indie press that champions marginalized writers with strong values and commitments to anti-racism, anti-colonialism, intersectionality, and empathy. We have been recognized by Women Who Submit for having a racially diverse masthead and women-led masthead; in addition, to having a staff that are primarily people of color, queer and trans, and who mostly live in the South. We are forever grateful to our community and thank you for keeping us afloat to do the work!!

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to acknowledge accomplishments in the Abode Press family.

• Poetry Reader, Teri Vela, has a new poem out in Black Fox Lit Mag. Read it here!

• Poetry Reader, Cheyenne William’s poems published in the March issue of Poetry have won the Frederick Bock Prize!!

• Poetry Reader, Angela Heiser, had a piece in German published at Behemoth Entgleist. Congrats, Angela!

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

Pre-order Weaving Liberation: An Archival Chapbook (Coming Nov 15!)

Weaving Liberation: An Archival Chapbook is a hybrid chapbook that documents one year of refusing genocide against Palestinians. Drawing connections between Palestinian liberation, relationship with land, nursing during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, transness, diaspora, and fishing, this collection offers an archive and genuflection to the communities that have come together for Palestinian liberation. Situated in the specificity of Dena’ina Land, the chapbook’s ephemera includes ceremonial scripts from actions, letters to an assembly member, and essays written in grief, rage, and desperation. Pre-order here!

In Weaving Liberation, M. K. Thekkumkattil demands an end to the US-sponsored Israeli genocide in Gaza, and an end to occupation, colonialism, and imperialism in all their forms—intimate, bodily, political, structural, societal. Dreaming of liberation while demanding accountability, this is a book that refuses borders to imagine collective care.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl

About the Author: M. K. Thekkumkattil (they/them) is a trans, disabled, kinky writer and nurse whose liberation is bound up with Palestinian Liberation. They write about care work, kink, relationship with land, among other things. They received a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award and fellowships from Queer Art Mentorship, Lambda Literary, VONA, and Writing by Writers. Their work can be found in Black Warrior Review, smoke and mold, ___figuration, Autostraddle, Fence Magazine, Year Round Queer, & In the Future There Are No Hospitals. Their debut essay collection, The Sexuality of Care, will be published by Feminist Press in 2026. IG: thekkumkattilmk

Don’t Miss Out on Our Fall Sale!

We’re having our first sale of the year! All chapbooks are 25% off if you use the code Fallsale25, valid until November 15th. Don’t miss your chance to get a chapbook with us! Check out our bookstore here.

Sign Up for Our Next Workshop!

Writing with the Earth: An Anti-Imperialism Towards Eco-Poetics Part II

Dec 03, 2025, 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM CST : Virtual Workshop

Workshop Description: Building on the foundation laid in the first workshop, participants will dive deeper into Western imperialism’s impact on the environment and how writers grapple with those impacts in their writings. Reading work by contemporary poets Cianga, Golden, Maya Salameh, this workshop begs the question: how are we to interpret the ecological vulnerability of our time through language, place, history and emergent knowledge? How can we re-embed ourselves into the natural world, and remind ourselves of our responsibility to it? This layered response allows for a deeper engagement with ecological works and moves beyond the aesthetic/sensorial into ethical and stewardship capacity. Participation in the first workshop is not required.

Ashia Ajani is a sun shower, an overripe nectarine, a carnivorous plant, a glass bead. They are the author of one poetry collection, Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing, 2023) and a forthcoming collection of lyric essays, Tending the Vines (Timber Press, TBA). Her writing is a kaleidoscope of her work as an eco-griot & abolitionist.

Tickets are $25 minimum for general admission and $10 for writers-in-need. All proceeds go towards paying our presenters and helping the Press pay for operational expenses. Thank you for your contribution to help keep an indie intersectional press afloat! Get your tickets here.

Find us at the Houston Zine Fest!

This year we’ll be tabling at Houston Zine Fest, which will take place at The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art on Nov 15 from 12-6pm. We’ll be tabling with all of our chapbooks and zines, and we’ll also have information about our 2026 programming and goodies! Stop by and come see us Houston!

We close for submissions in ONE MONTH!

Haven’t had a chance to submit your chapbook yet? We close for submissions on November 30th, and you don’t want to miss your chance to submit to us.

Abode Press wants to read work that discusses identity, origin, and culture. Every abode is unique to the person who lives there. We want to read about the ghosts in your closet, the heritage that guides your cooking, the cultural emblems that decorate your walls. Because when someone invites you into their abode, they’re letting you see a piece of themselves. At Abode, we believe it’s important to prioritize these narratives to create a world with better empathy, understanding, and compassion for others.

To clarify, we are not specifically asking for work that takes place inside of a home; we are simply curious about the people who live in them. Submit here!

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to acknowledge accomplishments in the Abode Press family.

• Poetry Reader, Cheyenne Williams has a poem in the upcoming anthology “Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms & Futurisms” by Torrey House Press! Preorder here!

• Managing Editor, Marilyn Ramirez is having a story read as part of Stories on Stage Davis. Congrats, Marilyn!

• Virtual Retreat 2025 Alum, MP Vare’s chapbook Daddio: An Iterative Erasure was published by Bottlecap Press this week and last week their essay “Family Ecology” was in The Audacity. Congratulations!

• Hybrid Reader, Sarah Alcaide-Escue was accepted to do a writing retreat with Aimee Nezhukumatathil and The Himalayan Writing Retreat in June. Congrats!

Congratulations to these Abode staff members and alum!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

Earth & Earth-like Planets is Officially Here!

Happy Pub Day to our next Prose chapbook, Earth and Earth-like Planets. The book is officially out in the world and all orders will ship next week. Place your order today here!

Earth & Earth-like Planets by Devaki D. Devi is a collection of imaginative short stories following Indian American children, teens, and young adults as they come of age in a country that often alienates them. This genre-bending chapbook hums with the steady pulse of Indian culture as diasporic youth create new worlds amid the weight of family expectations, shifting social norms, gender roles, and economic pressure. Rooted in heritage, Devi's speculative prose transports readers to new planets, ones that remind us dreaming isn't just survival, but rather, a radical act of envisioning the futures we all deserve.

We’re Tabling at Zine Fest Houston 2025!

This year we’ll be tabling at Houston Zine Fest, which will take place at The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art on Nov 15 from 12-6pm. We’ll be tabling with all of our chapbooks and zines, and we’ll also have information about our 2026 programming and goodies! Stop by and come see us Houston!

Welcome Our Two New Graphic Designers!

Mikayla is our new graphic designer at Abode Press. She studied Peace & Justice and Women & Gender Studies at Pace University and is pursuing a Master’s in Health Communication for Social Change at the City University of New York. She is passionate about advocacy and communication, and believes thoughtful design can amplify marginalized voices and spark meaningful change. Beyond her creative work, Mikayla is a reproductive rights advocate and an avid reader whose love of books and research fuels her commitment to storytelling, connection, and social justice.

Welcome our next Graphic Designer, Maiu! Maiu is a queer, Argentinian American graphic designer from Pratt Institute with an MFA in Communication Design. When she’s not building brand assets, she likes to read, make art, take long city walks, and explore new restaurants.

Welcome to the team!

Help Us Reach Our Fundraising Goal of $1,000 by Oct 31st!

We’re setting a new goal to reach $1,000 by the end of October. We have $630 to raise left. Help us get there so we can continue to amplify marginalized voices amidst a growing effort to silence them!

Contributions are tax-deductible and will go towards increasing author payments, operational expenses, and for more literary offerings, including our first-ever full-length publication prize. Your donations will go towards supporting an indie press that champions marginalized writers with strong values and commitments to anti-racism, anti-colonialism, intersectionality, and empathy.

We have been recognized by Women Who Submit for having a racially diverse masthead and women-led masthead; in addition, to having a staff that are primarily people of color, queer and trans, and who mostly live in the South. We are forever grateful to our community and thank you for keeping us afloat to do the work!!

Help us reach our yearly goal by donating here.

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to welcome and congratulate new team members as well as recent promotions within the Abode Press family.

• Farrah Fang, author of our first-ever published chapbook Quererme En La Luz, had her full-length collection shortlisted by Noemi Press for the 2025 Noemi Press Book Award! Congrats, Farrah!

• Angela Heiser published fours poems at The Poetry Lighthouse and boats against the current. Congrats, Angela!

• Ravneet Sandhu has two workshops coming up! Check her out with Tiny Spoon on Oct 4th and 5th from 12 to 2pm EST and with Blue Stoop on Oct 23 at 4 pm ET. See you there!

• Crystal Odelle will be reading in San Francisco with some rad queers for Foglifter mid-October! And as a bonus, their story “Target Weight” will be in their new issue which drops then, too!

• Cheyenne Williams has two poems published online at Chapter House Journal titled “wishlist” and “Arizona Abecedarian.” Congrats, Cheyenne!

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

Our next chapbook is ready for pre-order!

Earth & Earth-like Planets by Devaki D. Devi is a collection of imaginative short stories following Indian American children, teens, and young adults as they come of age in a country that often alienates them. This genre-bending chapbook hums with the steady pulse of Indian culture as diasporic youth create new worlds amid the weight of family expectations, shifting social norms, gender roles, and economic pressure. Rooted in heritage, Devi's speculative prose transports readers to new planets, ones that remind us dreaming isn't just survival, but rather, a radical act of envisioning the futures we all deserve.

The chapbook is our last one in the 2024-2025 chapbook series and we’re so excited to close out our first-ever selected books with Devi’s collection!

Available for pre-order here!

Chapbook Submissions Are Rolling In!

We're into our first few weeks of open submissions and are already in love with all the work we're receiving across our Poetry, Prose, and Hybrid genres. Don't forget to submit your work to us!

For our commitment to anti-racist work in the publishing world, we have FEE WAIVED submissions available for Black and Indigenous identifying writers available in Submittable.

Upcoming Abode Workshops!

Only a few weeks away! Writing with the Earth: An Anti-Imperialism Approach Towards Eco-Poetics

Tue, Sep 16 | Virtual Workshop

Workshop Description: We are experiencing a renaissance of environmental writing, but little room is made to explore the relationship of war, occupation and environmental decline. We are living in the sixth mass extinction, largely due to the Western war machine. How are we to create art during times of decline? What is the role of the creative in opposition to ecological violence? Through reading poems of Jayne Cortez, Fady Joudah, and Diana Khoi Nguyen in conversations with contemporary texts about environmental harms and their long lives, participants will walk away with material that addresses the intersections of environmental harm and war making in their writing.

Through reading poems of Jayne Cortez, Fady Joudah, and Diana Khoi Nguyen in conversations with contemporary texts about environmental harms and their long lives, participants will walk away with material that addresses the intersections of environmental harm and war making in their writing.

Looking to attend but the date doesn’t work? We provide 30-day access to the workshop recording with proof of receipt. Email diamond@abodepress.com for access.

RSVP here!

Help Us Reach Our First Fundraiser Goal of $500 by end of August!

We almost hit our goal to have $500 by the end of August, but still have a long ways to go to reach our yearly fundraising goal. With the loss of such important grants and funding in the publishing world, we're relying on our community to help keep us afloat. Please donate today if you have the means!

Help us reach our yearly goal by donating here.

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to welcome and congratulate new team members as well as recent promotions within the Abode Press family.

• Teri Vela published four poems on Villain Era, a few of which she worked on at Abode’s online retreat this Summer. We’re so happy to see them out in the world, Teri!

• Turi Sioson has two forthcoming poems in the Summer issue of the Hopkins Review. Congratulations, Turi!

• Addie Tsai has their first academic monograph coming out September 18th. Order “Straight White Men Can't Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture” here!

• Our Founder & Director, Diamond Braxton "MANTÉ,” will be a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook from Sept 25 - Oct 7 to finish their short story collection. Can’t wait to read the collection!

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

It’s been just over a month since Sea Changes by Hayun Cho has entered the world, and our very own Angela Heiser, Poetry Reader and Publicity Intern at Abode, sat down with the author to get her insight. Sea Changes is a hybrid collection that weaves together theories of survival and transformation in the face of negotiating rage, grief, pleasure, kinship, and the Korean diaspora. It is the seventh chapbook in Abode's 2024-2025 lineup and is officially available here!

Hayun Cho is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Notre Dame. She researches feminist and queer theory, as well as the role of emotion in South Korean film and literature. Both her scholarly and creative work interrogate gender and cultural norms. Her poetry has been featured in The Rumpus, The Margins, Cream City Review and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I had the opportunity to ask author Hayun Cho about the inspiration behind and creative process that shaped her debut hybrid chapbook.

Cho excels at crafting searingly strong biting endings in this collection. Her work deftly incorporates the quotidian and the mythical to elevate contemplations of identity, self, and other within the context of womanhood in the Korean diaspora. Choosing apples at the Korean grocery store, chopping vegetables around the kitchen table. Cho grapples with the weight of all we inherit from our foremothers–emotionally and otherwise. And questions whether it is really ours to carry through this world?

Building up to the catharsis, her poems explore rich gifts of nature in the form of jasmine, cherries, rice, but also forests and the titular sea. Changing seasons provide insight into the range of emotional journeys and transformations navigated in these pages. Cho reflects on the role of her foremothers and her own expected role, in a series of poems around the kitchen table, to honor the repressed rage, sit with tangible melancholy and loneliness, and act on the urge to rebel that these women were forced to bury deep within or hand down to her.

The intergenerational emotional inheritance is palpable in the way seismic activity is felt along fault lines. Navigating the fault lines with aplomb, Cho walks through decades of fraught struggles to meet social expectations while maintaining female agency. Not one to balk at a challenge, she experiments with form and typography in this cunningly erudite portrayal of girl-and womanhood in a storm of culture, language and familial history. Out of the decades of collected wounds, Cho nonetheless deftly manifests a persistent hope beneath the surface.

Sea Changes draws on the natural world in a mystical way. How did your work arrive at these themes? What role has the power of the natural world had in inspiring your work?

Many of the pieces in Sea Changes were inspired from ruminations in the lush green of Southern California. I learned a lot about resilience observing plant life. Sometimes I would think a rose bush on my street had died, but the blooms would return just when I had accepted its fate. I was curious about the impulse to notice and appreciate small signs of life, to hold onto imagination and shift one’s perspective even when the world feels terrifying.

Who or what influenced you when writing Sea Changes?

Writers such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Julietta Singh, and Sara Ahmed greatly influenced the way I approach writing as a mode of critique, speculation, and more broadly contemplating one’s position in the world, and what to do with that. Embracing the intensity rooted in creative practice, as emotional as it is intellectual, has been life-changing for me. My family and my friendships also inspire me, as well as my research which examines emotion as feminist knowledge in literature and film. Sea Changes was written during a period when some of my elders were ill, and I was reckoning with what it means to inherit strength and pain from other women. I was also finishing graduate school. During this intense time, writing became a tool to articulate what was happening and what was ultimately changing. I wrote Sea Changes mostly in solitude, so it is meaningful if not strange to share it with an audience.

Do you have recommendations for other writers who discuss the Korean diaspora that we should be reading and/or works in translation?

I love Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Franny Choi, Suji Kwock Kim, Alexander Chee, Emily Jungmin Yoon, and Michelle Zauner, among many others. I always return to Cha’s Dictee. It remakes the English language, in my opinion, and is one of the books that made me want to be a writer. I would recommend Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On which beautifully addresses the relationship between political despair and possibility. Kim’s Notes from the Divided Country confronts historical memory across generations and lingers in gorgeous metaphors such as the onion (you’ll know when you read it).

What advice do you have for other writers spanning two cultures?

There is no single origin point, destination, or set of useful definitions of the Korean diaspora in my writing. Sea Changes confronts the messy, unruly hybridity of diaspora through embodied acts of thinking, feeling, and writing. I am sure everyone approaches writing from a space of diaspora differently. I start with the emotions that arise from an encounter, detail, or memory, and go from there. I often write because I need some sort of emotional catharsis or because the languages and texts around me are not adequate to express what I want to express. It feels important to recognize that lived experience can be a formidable archive. Something I’ve found helpful recently is to accept when I don’t write anything I like. Sometimes a stretch of awkward writing or even silence is necessary to the vision, and the vision always changes.

You draw on myth: Scylla and Persephone appear in this work. What is the significance for you?

I was always fascinated by women of myth who were associated with ruin or misfortune. They seemed very powerful to me in their embodiment of the monstrous and the taboo. As a young reader who loved mythology, I sympathized with these women because I believed they deserved better and wanted to know more about their interiority. I wanted to honor that informal education or mode of thinking by placing it in conversation with contemporary, everyday intimacies.

When you are not writing or teaching, what do you enjoy in your free time?

I enjoy going on long walks, running, reading, watching movies, and cooking.

Sea Changes is now available for purchase. Grab your copy here!

Angela Heiser is a Poetry Reader and Publicity Intern here at Abode. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arcana Poetry Press, Spark to Flame, Gigantic Tentacles, Carolina Muse, The Poetry Lighthouse, and The Red Mud Review. Her poem 'Cornhusker' was awarded the Poetry Genre Winner for the 2024-2025 issue of The Red Mud Review. She is an alum of Writers in Paradise and reads for Abode Press, Wildscape, and Libre Lit. Find her on instagram @angelacheiser.

We open for chapbook submissions this month!!

Chapbook submissions open again on August 15th, 2025! Get ready to submit your best poetry, hybrid, or prose work to Abode Press! We are seeking chapbook manuscripts that explore themes of identity, origin, and culture. Share what evokes a sense of home for you. For all submission guidelines and details about author packages, please visit our website. Kindly note that at this time, we are looking for work from writers based in the United States.

We’re hiring a Graphic Designer!

Work with us and contribute to our social media pages, website, and Substack. QTBIPOC creatives in the South are highly encouraged to apply.​ Applicants must be 21 years of age by August 1st, 2025 and must reside in the U.S. to be considered. If interested, please send your CV and portfolio to diamond@abodepress.com. In the email body, express why you want to work for us + how you align with Abode Press. We look forward to hearing from you! Applicants who fit the criteria will be reached out to in early August.

Meet our 2025 Prose, Poetry, and Hybrid Chapbook Readers!

We are thrilled to introduce our Fall Chapbook Reading Teams! Our 2025 fall reading period is right around the corner and we are so excited to have these amazing readers join us. Each team is comprised of 15-20 readers, all who are talented writers, editors, and experienced readers. We're looking forward to have them join us!

Upcoming Abode Workshops!

Don’t forget to sign up for Beyond Self-Translation: Bilingualizing the Poetic Process as a Form of Destruction and Creation. Happening this month!

Sun, Aug 17 | Virtual Workshop | 12:00-2:00pm CST

“Beyond self-translation” taught by Angelica Dàvila, author of Bilingual Bitch, intends to question the originality of a translated poem. Bilingual writers who self-translate their work may often find themselves inspired by new ideas during the self-translation process. What do we do with these new ideas? Oftentimes, we may think that these inspirations may not have a place in the translated poem, but this may be a form of resistance within our poetic process. When we translate, we make ourselves accessible in another language. Though, as bilingual writers, should we limit ourselves to being accessible in one language over the other or should we resist? As new ideas form during the act of self-translation, our poetic process challenges us to consider whether we need to adhere to translating a poem or whether we need to embrace the fluidity of language and creativity to create new multiple and original poems that all stem from that first poem that we wanted to self translate.

Get tickets here.

Writing with the Earth: An Anti-Imperialism Approach Towards Eco-Poetics

Tue, Sep 16 | Virtual Workshop

We are experiencing a renaissance of environmental writing, but little room is made to explore the relationship of war, occupation and environmental decline. We are living in the sixth mass extinction, largely due to the Western war machine. How are we to create art during times of decline? What is the role of the creative in opposition to ecological violence? Through reading poems of Jayne Cortez, Fady Joudah, and Diana Khoi Nguyen in conversations with contemporary texts about environmental harms and their long lives, participants will walk away with material that addresses the intersections of environmental harm and war making in their writing.

Through reading poems of Jayne Cortez, Fady Joudah, and Diana Khoi Nguyen in conversations with contemporary texts about environmental harms and their long lives, participants will walk away with material that addresses the intersections of environmental harm and war making in their writing.

Get tickets here.

Help Us Reach Our First Fundraiser Goal of $500 by end of August!

We are kicking off this summer with our annual fundraiser to help us do the work we do. Despite the current administration's cuts towards grant funding, we are committed more now than ever to continue amplifying underrepresented voices. As a volunteer-led, anti-racist 501(c)3 press, we publish emerging marginalized writers whose powerful works remind of us home. Many of our authors exist at the brink of what the current administration wants to censor, erase, and silence; and it is our goal to make sure their voices are heard, uplifted, and empowered.

In 2025, we entered our second year of operation having increased our workshop offerings and doubling the size of our annual retreat. We've published 7 authors, with more in our publication queue, and we were relying on several important grants to continue scaling our operations and to increase payments towards authors, staff, and more. Due to the eradication of these grants and increased censorship, book bans, and more, we are hoping our community can help us reach our annual fundraising goal so we can continue doing the work we do.

Contributions are tax-deductible and will go towards increasing author payments, operational expenses, and for more literary offerings, including our first-ever full-length publication prize. Your donations will go towards supporting an indie press that champions marginalized writers with strong values and commitments to anti-racism, anti-colonialism, intersectionality, and empathy. We have been recognized by Women Who Submit for having a racially diverse masthead and women-led masthead; in addition, to having a staff that are primarily people of color, queer and trans, and who mostly live in the South. We are forever grateful to our community and thank you for keeping us afloat to do the work!!

Help us reach our first goal of $500 by donating here.

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to welcome and congratulate new team members as well as recent promotions within the Abode Press family.

• Chase Martin and Marilyn Ramírez, who originally started as Hybrid and Prose readers, will move into training as co-Managing Editors for our reading periods. We are so excited for them both to move into this role with us!

• 2024 Abode Press Nonfiction Retreat Fellow, Eleanor Ball's poem she drafted at retreat last year just got picked up by Haven Spec. Congrats to Eleanor!

• Check out out very own Poetry reader Teri Vela’s poem “Before & After” in volume 9 of Troublemaker Firestarter. Find it here.

• Sarah Alcaide-Escue has a forthcoming poem in the Louisville Review. Congratulations, Sarah!

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

Help Us Stay Afloat with Our Annual Fundraiser!

We are kicking off this summer with our annual fundraiser to help us do the work we do. Despite the current administration's cuts towards grant funding, we are committed more now than ever to continue amplifying underrepresented voices. As a volunteer-led, anti-racist 501(c)3 press, we publish emerging marginalized writers whose powerful works remind of us home. Many of our authors exist at the brink of what the current administration wants to censor, erase, and silence; and it is our goal to make sure their voices are heard, uplifted, and empowered.

In 2025, we entered our second year of operation having increased our workshop offerings and doubling the size of our annual retreat. We've published 7 authors, with more in our publication queue, and we were relying on several important grants to continue scaling our operations and to increase payments towards authors, staff, and more. Due to the eradication of these grants and increased censorship, book bans, and more, we are hoping our community can help us reach our annual fundraising goal so we can continue doing the work we do.

Contributions are tax-deductible and will go towards increasing author payments, operational expenses, and for more literary offerings, including our first-ever full-length publication prize. Your donations will go towards supporting an indie press that champions marginalized writers with strong values and commitments to anti-racism, anti-colonialism, intersectionality, and empathy. We have been recognized by Women Who Submit for having a racially diverse masthead and women-led masthead; in addition, to having a staff that are primarily people of color, queer and trans, and who mostly live in the South. We are forever grateful to our community and thank you for keeping us afloat to do the work!!

Help us reach our first goal of $500 by donating here.

Hot on the Shelves!

We’re excited to have two new chapbooks available in our online bookstore. Learn about them below:

Vanities by Ella Yuna Kim (Austin Youth Poet Laureate)

Abode Press is thrilled to be the publisher of the 2024-2025 Austin Youth Poet Laureate, Ella Kim, and her poetry chapbook Vanities. We have 200 copies of this phenomenal chapbook. Get yours today!  

About Ella Kim: Ella Yuna Kim, a senior at St. Stephen's Episcopal School, is the 2024-2025 Austin Youth Poet Laureate. At St. Stephen's, Ella has been editor and graphic designer for The Bell, the school’s newspaper, and involved in theater, acting in numerous plays and musicals. She recently won First Prize in Princeton University’s Lewis Center of the Arts Ten-Minute Play contest. She will be attending Yale in the Fall.  

Copyright @ 2025 Austin Public Library Friends Foundation 
Editor: Bianca Alyssa Pérez, Austin Youth Poet Laureate
Book Design: Diamond Braxton
Cover Design: Bianca Alyssa Perez
Cover Image: "Details of Faces" by Jean Lapautre, ca. 1690  

Austin Youth Poet Laureate Judges Committee: Katrina Brooks, Jennifer Chang, Kathleen Houlihan, Amanda Johnston, Katherine Lamb, Cecily Parks, Leticia Urieta  

Mentors: Bianca Alyssa Pérez and Darrell Limuel  

Learn more about the Austin Youth Poet Laureate Program here: https://austinlibrary.org/austin-youth-poet-laureate/

Sea Changes by Hayun Cho

Sea Changes by Hayun Cho is the seventh chapbook in Abode's 2024-2025 lineup and is officially available for pre-order! All orders will be shipped by early July. There are only 100 copies of this chapbook available, so make sure to get your copy while you can! 

Book Description: Sea Changes by Hayun Cho is a hybrid collection that weaves theories of survival and transformation in the face of negotiating rage, grief, pleasure, kinship, and the Korean diaspora. The collection imagines everyday life and the natural world as mediums of revelation through which another world may be possible, traversing kitchens, attics, cities, and seasons. At turns argumentative and mystical, Sea Changes explores the intersections between women’s embodiment, intergenerational memory, and creative practice. The errant lyric voice, buoyed by the intimacies of sisterhood and friendship, arrives at the necessity of dreaming. Sea Changes reflects upon the insurgent promise of being the reader and writer of one’s life. 

About the Author: Hayun Cho’s poetry appears in The Rumpus, The Margins, Portland Review, Cream City Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Hayun is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Notre Dame. She holds a PhD and MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Southern California and a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Hayun’s creative and scholarly work explores the relationship between gender and sexuality, emotion, and creative practice in feminist cultural production. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. 

Praise for Sea Changes by Hayun Cho: 

"Hayun's poems are enveloped in the tender meat of a soft, colorful creature with a poisonous stinger. Like waves, they push and pull, lapping at the shores of our deepest longing. Otherworldly yet grounded in the sticky matter that makes up our lives, Hayun's writing stares back at history's capacious glare, and within her gaze, home moves through us like ocean water." —Ashia Ajani, author of Heirloom 

"Hayun Cho's Sea Changes is a captivating new take on womanhood, feminine rage, diaspora, consumption, and the responsibilities we bear and carry as our ancestors' descendants. Seemingly mundane moments between women - as in 'I walk to the Korean grocery store to buy apples' where an elder teaches her how to select the best ones - and haunting imaginings - such as 'A House Full of Women Who Live Forever' where dream women become her allies - are given equal weight and opportunity to move readers. With precision and beauty, this is a collection that, much like Cho's ghosts, will stay with you long after the last poem rings true." —Sofía Aguilar, author of amor. and STREAMING SERVICE: season two

Order your copy of Sea Changes here.

Upcoming Abode Workshop!

We have a phenomenal writing workshop planned for August. Take a look below:

Beyond Self-Translation: Bilingualizing the Poetic Process as a Form of Destruction and Creation

Sun, Aug 17 | Virtual Workshop | 12:00-2:00pm CST

“Beyond self-translation” taught by Angelica Dàvila, author of Bilingual Bitch, intends to question the originality of a translated poem. Bilingual writers who self-translate their work may often find themselves inspired by new ideas during the self-translation process. What do we do with these new ideas? Oftentimes, we may think that these inspirations may not have a place in the translated poem, but this may be a form of resistance within our poetic process. When we translate, we make ourselves accessible in another language. Though, as bilingual writers, should we limit ourselves to being accessible in one language over the other or should we resist? As new ideas form during the act of self-translation, our poetic process challenges us to consider whether we need to adhere to translating a poem or whether we need to embrace the fluidity of language and creativity to create new multiple and original poems that all stem from that first poem that we wanted to self translate.

Get tickets here.

Our Virtual Retreat Has Officially Come to a Close!

We have officially concluded our second year of the Abode Press Virtual Retreat with faculty instructors including, KB Brookins, mónica teresa ortiz, Ariana Brown, Stephanie Macias, and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. The Retreat spanned the entire month of June, with workshops taking place on Sundays. Throughout the week, fellows had access to 2-3 weekly programs.

We had 57 incredible fellows join us this summer studying in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and speculative fiction, and we are incredibly grateful and excited to see all they achieve as writers, activists, community leaders, and artists. Take a look at our 2025 fellows and read their bios to learn more about them.

Abode Staff News!

We want to take a moment to welcome and congratulate new team members as well as recent promotions within the Abode Press family.

• Divine Byrd is joining our team as an Administrative Assistant. She will be helping us look for grants, posting our monthly Substack update, and other administrative tasks as they arise!

• Isaac Salazar, who started as a Poetry Reader on our team back in 2023, was recently promoted to the Editorial Poetry Assistant and will have a more leading role in helping us select poetry manuscripts during our reading period.

• Turi Sioson, who also started as a Poetry Reader, was promoted to Publicity Manager is overseeing the Publicity Team to promote our stellar authors!

• Em Fullenwider, who also started as a Poetry Reader, was promoted to Events Manager and will be helping us schedule events, planning, and more.

Congratulations to these Abode staff members!! Learn more about them on our Masthead page.

Thank you, as always, for your support! We love you!

"Hayun's poems are enveloped in the tender meat of a soft, colorful creature with a poisonous stinger. Like waves, they push and pull, lapping at the shores of our deepest longing. Otherworldly yet grounded in the sticky matter that makes up our lives, Hayun's writing stares back at history's capacious glare, and within her gaze, home moves through us like ocean water."— Ashia Ajani, author of Heirloom

"Hayun Cho's Sea Changes is a captivating new take on womanhood, feminine rage, diaspora, consumption, and the responsibilities we bear and carry as our ancestors' descendants. Seemingly mundane moments between women - as in 'I walk to the Korean grocery store to buy apples' where an elder teaches her how to select the best ones - and haunting imaginings - such as 'A House Full of Women Who Live Forever' where dream women become her allies - are given equal weight and opportunity to move readers. With precision and beauty, this is a collection that, much like Cho's ghosts, will stay with you long after the last poem rings true." — Sofía Aguilar, author of amor. and STREAMING SERVICE: season two 

Sea Changes by Hayun Cho is a hybrid collection that weaves theories of survival and transformation in the face of negotiating rage, grief, pleasure, kinship, and the Korean diaspora. The collection imagines everyday life and the natural world as mediums of revelation through which another world may be possible, traversing kitchens, attics, cities, and seasons. At turns argumentative and mystical, Sea Changes explores the intersections between women’s embodiment, intergenerational memory, and creative practice. The errant lyric voice, buoyed by the intimacies of sisterhood and friendship, arrives at the necessity of dreaming. Sea Changes reflects upon the insurgent promise of being the reader and writer of one’s life.

The official cover art will drop this week & we can’t wait to introduce this gorgeous chapbook into the world! <3

Catch us at Poesía y Jotería in San Antonio!

Abode will be celebrating Pride by tabling at Poesía y Jotería--a queer Spanglish open mic here in San Antonio on Saturday, June 7th from 6 to 8pm. Featured readers include Violeta Garza, Marcela Hernandez, and RatQing Rios. There will also be a drag show, mercadito, resource fair, and open mic. We’ll be tabling with our chapbooks and information about our 2025 programming. Stop by and say hi!

Abode Press Virtual Retreat Programming + Fellows!

This week is the start of our Abode Press Virtual Retreat with faculty instructors including KB Brookins, mónica teresa ortiz, Ariana Brown, Stephanie Macias, and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. The Retreat spans the entire month of June, with workshops taking place on Sundays. Throughout the week, fellows have access to 2-3 weekly programs. Our Retreat Programming is packed with seminars, lectures, craft talks, and workshops that are available to the public with tickets set to $25. Take a look at the programing here and don’t miss out on these incredible sessions!

In addition, we have 57 incredible fellows joining us this summer studying in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and speculative fiction and are incredibly grateful and excited to welcome them to Abode Press family. Take a look at our 2025 fellows and read their bios to learn more about them.

Chapbook News!

In addition, we’re excited to announce that Bilingual Bitch sold out of its first 100 copies, and we ordered an additional 50 because of the immense love for the book. Make sure to get your copy before it officially sells out. Sofía Aguilar, a journalist at HipLatina, also interviewed Angelica Dàvila about her chapbook. Thank you, Sofía for championing our author. You can read the interview on HipLatina here!

Secondly, our beloved first poetry collection Quererme En La Luz by Farrah Fang has officially sold out and is out of print. It’s a bittersweet feeling, but after two solid print runs, we are so thankful to have had the opportunity to bring this much needed chapbook into the world. Thank you to all of you for supporting Farrah, and we are so grateful to be her publisher.

Join our Intern Reading Program!

Ever wanted to work with us at Abode Press? We’re currently open for volunteer intern readers for our 2025 chapbook reading period, which starts August 15th! Interns can apply to read for our hybrid, prose, or poetry sections. Interns will have the chance to read manuscripts and gain access to the CLMP internship program to network with others in the publishing industry. Learn more on Submittable here.

Upcoming Abode Workshops!

On top of the Virtual Retreat program that the public can sign up for, we also have two stellar workshops planned for the month of June. Take a look at them below:

The Music of Minor Distractions: A Multi-genre Revision Workshop

Wed, Jun 11 | Virtual Workshop | 6:30-8:00pm CST

In this course, we will pay attention to what exists at the periphery of our current drafts and move through a revision process that embraces strangeness, unmaking and remaking, and unconventional approaches to plot and/or poetics. Get tickets here.

Temporary Utopias

Sat, Jun 14 | Virtual Workshop | 11am-12:30pm CST

Drawing upon AIDS literature for reference, Temporary Utopias seeks to provide a space of possibility in the past, present, and future tenses: example poems from queer ancestors, providing a blueprint for survival; forward-looking leaps in prompts encouraging alternative world-building; & more. Get tickets here!

Lastly!

June is one of the busiest months for us at Abode Press, and we hope to see you in-person or virtually at any of the events mentioned above. We’re also excited to announce that we’ll be attending AWP 2026 in Baltimore, and we cannot wait to keep meeting more and more of you all in person at the conference center if you plan to attend.

Since it is Pride Month, we also want to take a moment to reflect on the fact that our Masthead is mostly comprised of people of color who are also queer and/or trans. It’s important to us to uplift queer stories, and we are proud to be home to authors who also identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community. Want to support us or our authors for Pride Month? Check out TOY SOLDIERS by MICHAEL CHANG which queers language and culture to critique 21st century living. Or, make a one-time tax deductible donation to support us and the work we do at Abode Press. Your contributions, especially right now with slashes towards grant funding, are incredibly important to keeping us afloat so that we can continue to do this work.

Thank you, as always, for your support! Happy Pride y’all!

"Reminiscent of the poetry of Vanessa Angélica Villarreal and the sounds of Snow Tha Product, Bilingual Bitch puts serrano peppers on the cuts left by 'E.E.U.U.S.A.' Against the foreign museum of assimilation, Angelica Julia Davila's pocha poems invade English and reclaim the daily crossings of memory, of family, of history that make home."—Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, author of lo terciario/ the tertiary and Algarabía

Our next hybrid title Sea Changes by Hayun Cho is also available for pre-order!

Sea Changes is a hybrid collection that weaves theories of survival and transformation in the face of negotiating rage, grief, pleasure, kinship, and the Korean diaspora. This collection will be out May 31st!

Abode at AWP!

Abode will be at AWP in LA this week! You can pick up all of our chapbooks and even meet some of our authors all week at T848.

On Wednesday March 26, kick off the conference at our offsite reading with Infrarrealista Review and Audrey Hollis, Lit and Leather: Celebrating Queer Defiance, featuring Abode authors such as MICHAEL CHANG, féi hernandez, and Angelica Julia Dàvila.

On Thursday March 27th, Angelica will be signing Bilingual Bitch from 11am to 12pm, Farrah Fang will be signing Quererme en La Luz from 2pm to 3pm.

If we miss you in LA, we also have a few local events coming up!

Austin Independent Book Fair - April 5th, 12-4pm

Check out our table and say hello to our staff at the second Austin Indie Book Fair, at Radio/East, 3504 Montopolis Dr, Austin, TX!

Community + Resistance Celebrating the Latino Poetry Reader Anthology - April 19th, 6-8pm

Join Abode Press at the Price Center in San Marcos, TX to celebrate the release of the Latino Poetry Reader! This reading will specifically focus on themes of Community and Resistance from the anthology and will feature anthology contributor Carmen Tafolla and special literary guests including Anel I. Flores, Cloud Cardona, Chibbi Orduna, aureleo sans, Stephen Rendon, Bianca Alyssa Perez, Gaby Benitez, and more!

This event is free to attend! Masks are strongly encouraged and will be provided. We will also have air purifiers courtesy of Clean the Air ATX to help ventilate airflow.

Virtual Workshop - Docupoetics: Distilling Truths in Oral Histories - April 28th, 6:30pm-8pm CT

The next workshop in our virtual series is “Docupoetics: Distilling Truths in Oral Histories” led by Dena Igusti. Tickets for this workshop are $25 with options available for writers in need.

With commonly known forms of western documentary and its history of exploitation, there are potential risk factors that can affect the way a community and/or self tells a story, such as including identifying information that endangers other community members, exposure of immigration status, unintentionally increasing surveillance of a community, and more. Drawing examples from Philip Metres, Tarfia Faizullah, and Dena Igusti's personal anecdotes of navigating state surveillance in post 9/11 New York City, we will explore docu-poetics, and how being able to place archives and oral history in poems allows emotional exploration and distills truths without fully compromising identity risks.

We can’t wait to celebrate and create radical literature with you virtually or in person soon!