Autumn House Press

“Jasmine Reid writes a shapeful, theoretical work involved in the rigorous attending to emergent selves and the languages made in calling them into being.” —aracelis girmay

Interlocutor Goddess explores the creation of a trans language for selfhood within an exilic state of "ecstatic grief."

Her poetry employs a trans-lyricism, weaving together dual meanings through homonyms, homophones, and portmanteaus to create a layered, fugitive language that resists rigid classifications. At its core, Interlocutor Goddess is an act of transfiguration, a celebration of girlhood, and a reclamation of wholeness for all who exist beyond imposed boundaries.

Named one of the "Best Books of 2024" by the New York Public Library, Book of Kin draws on the poet’s Iranian heritage to process life-altering loss and grief.

Darius Atefat-Peckham’s debut poetry collection follows a boy’s coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead.

Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother’s poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one’s beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory “like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue.”

At once panoramic and deeply personal, Cunningham writes with a documentarian’s eye and a father’s heart.

Using images of the great American West and the highways that connect it, she charts a path through landscapes of disenfranchisement toward self-determination and agency. Throughout the collection, self-driving redefines freedom as both a state and a mindset. In a bold declaration, Fagin writes: “I knew my rights / were all the rights, my freedoms all the freedoms,” embodying a call for expansive liberation. This collection is a powerful exploration of identity, impermanence, and the boundless possibilities of reimagined narratives.

With disarming charm and good humor, Fuller charts a clear-eyed path for not only accepting but celebrating differences of all kinds. Bigger explores how we want the world to be as large and open as possible for the people we love—and how this kind of love expands our own world too.

Listed as a “New & Noteworthy” Poetry Collection by the New York Times and named by New York Public Library as one of 2020’s “Best Books for Adults," Grimoire is a stunning sophomore collection not to be missed. 

An anthology of nature poetry by queer authors celebrating the natural world and rethinking the nature poem. 

Spanning three centuries, this anthology amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry. Showcasing over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Queer Nature offers a new context for and expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world. 

In the introduction, editor Michael Walsh writes that the anthology is “concerned with poems that speak to and about nature as the term is applied in everyday language to queer and trans bodies and identities . . . Queer Nature remains interested in elements, flora, fauna, habitats, homes, and natural forces—literary aspects of the work that allow queer and trans people to speak within their specific cultural and literary histories of the abnormal, the animal, the elemental, and the unnatural.” The anthology features poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Blanco, Kay Ryan, Jericho Brown, Allen Ginsberg, Natalie Diaz, and June Jordan, as well as emerging voices such as Jari Bradley, Alicia Mountain, Eric Tran, and Jim Whiteside.

Winner of the 2023 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, the essays in Laura Jackson's debut, Deep & Wild, chronicle the beauty and awe of Appalachia through the eyes of a lifelong West Virginian.

Jackson employs her knowledge of and curiosity for the region to describe life in West Virginia as it actually is while dismantling stereotypes portrayed in popular media with humor and tenderness. Jackson works to describe what is special about her home, looking head-on at all the ways life in West Virginia may be wonderful and terrible, beautiful and ugly. Moving beyond all-too-common Appalachian stories of hardship and poverty, Jackson’s collection revels in joy, family, and nature.

Through her essays, Jackson invites readers to peer under creek rocks for crawfish, look a little more fondly at opossums, a road trip to an annual ramp festival, and learn why not to trust a GPS along West Virginia’s rugged roads. From her living room to Appalachian hollows, Jackson approaches the sublime, seeking truths in the removal of a stump from her backyard and in John Denver’s famous song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

Featured in Electric Lit's "15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Winter"

Award-winning author Marian Crotty's sophomore collection centers on resilient female protagonists and offers a view into queer life and love outside of its major coastal cities. The characters in Crotty’s collection are searching—for understanding, acceptance, or forgiveness. 

In the title story, an elderly rape crisis volunteer’s advocacy for a survivor leads her to reexamine her role in estrangement from her son; in “Halloween,” a queer teen is counseled through heartbreak by her unlucky-in-love grandmother; and in “Family Resemblance,” a group of families whose children share the same sperm donor is disrupted by the arrival of a minor celebrity. 

While marginalization, loneliness, and bigotry hover in the distance of Near Strangers, the book’s tone is hopeful and invites readers to reflect on our shared human experience with empathy.

New flash fiction collection by Sherrie Flick, coeditor of Flash Fiction America and author of Thank Your Lucky Stars and Whiskey, Etc., a Foreword INDIES bronze prize for best story collection.

I Have Not Considered Consequences delves into the complexities of grief, desire, and a peculiar intersection between humans and bears. Flick’s evocative and thought-provoking stories follow characters like Bobby, a local home inspector who zips into a bear suit on his daily rounds, and a Gen-X couple, Matty and Trudy, navigating the ups and downs of their adult lives, from a dead fish named Patti Smith to dashed dreams of indie rock stardom. Women wander through small-town streets as they ponder love, allegiance, and Edith Wharton.

In Flick’s world, bears don’t just roam the wild—they play basketball, dance, and even work as midlevel business professionals. Through this memorable cast of characters, Flick reveals intriguing secrets about humanity and yearning with her signature blend of stark honesty and humor.

 In her debut book, Nnoka poses the question that propels the collection: “Where is the path forward / that ensures no recurrence?” Rather than gesture toward resolution, Les Portes dwells inside this question, and what emerges is not consolation but an immense reckoning.

Backgrounded by the New Mexico landscape—a place of isolation, strange beauty, and potential transformation—this collection offers unexpected flashes of grace and hope.

This anthology of over 300 poems brings together America’s diverse spiritual traditions in one volume.

John Hoerr's Monongahela Dusk is a stunning novel exploring real-life events set in 1930s industrial Pittsburgh. 

Rhodes’s fourth collection mixes form and free verse, specifically using the rondelet’s tight, obsessive repetition as a means to harness and modulate frenetic content.

Between Song and Storycelebrates the contemporary essay’s capacity to live between the two worlds of lyric and narrative. The editors have sought to capture that duality in this anthology, a collection of writings that exemplifies the diverse, exuberant, and intrepid forms of the contemporary essay. Designed for use in any writing course focusing on the craft of the essay, the anthology includes healthy selections of lyric and formally adventurous essays, as well as those focused on nature and travel writing, and more nuanced explorations of place. This anthology tells a rich story about the wealth of experimentation and diversity of approaches to the essay in the twenty-first century. Readers will be engaged and surprised. 

Includes work by Dorothy Allison, Jimmy Santiago Baca, John Biguenet, Tom Bissell, Greg Bottoms, Joy Castro, Toi Derricotte, Brian Doyle, Gretel Ehrlich, Jane Fishman, Linda Hogan, Barbara Hurd, Lori Jakiela, Jamaica Kincaid, Phillip Lopate, BK Loren, Kathryn Miles, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, Dinty W. Moore, Naomi Shihab Nye, Joyce Carol Oates, Alicia Ostriker, Michael Pollan, Lia Purpura, Janisse Ray, Pattiann Rogers, Sheryl St. Germain, Marjane Satrapi, John Edgar Wideman and more.

Keeping the Wolves at Bay reminds us that reading stories is an affirmation that life, no matter how difficult, is always fascinating.

This collection of fiction, poetry, and drama reflects a diverse, aspiring generation of writers, readers, and teachers. Including fiction by ZZ Packer, Carlos Hernandez, Junot Diaz, Wang Ping, and Percival Everett; poetry by Li-Young Lee, Chana Bloch, Lucille Clifton, Toi Derricotte, Linh Dinh, Martin Espada, Etheridge Knight, Dorianne Laux, Ada Limon, Terrance Hayes, Miguel Pinero, Evie Shockley, Gary Soto, Brian Turner, and Rita Dove; drama by Chad Beckim, Karen Hartman, and Elizabeth Primamore.

Using her natural curiosity and wit, Ayres explores how people and bears coexist, and what happens when things go wrong. This page-turner will delight any reader with an interest in the natural world and anyone who is awed by the power and majesty of the black bear.

Steven Schwartz’s stories never stand still. With pathos and humor, they probe ahead, searching out the tender souls of his characters.

Includes poems by Kim Addonizio, Jimmy Santiago Baca, George Bilgere, Chana Bloch, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Stephen Dobyns, Rita Dove, Denise Duhamel, Stephen Dunn, Terrance Hayes, Bob Hicok, Jane Hirshfield, Tony Hoagland, Marie Howe, Jane Kenyon, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, William Matthews, Jeffery McDaniel, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ed Ochester, Linda Pastan, Natasha Tretheway, and many more. 

Whittemore's book explores the struggle of relationships changing (or ending) and how we come to understand and accept our past and ourselves. Anyone who celebrates the smallest aspects of our everyday world will fall in love with Whittemore’s work.

These thirteen stories explore gender, sexuality, love, and family dynamics while always maintaining a sense of humor. 

Winner of the Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, Dickson Lam's debut explores his transformation from a teenage graffiti writer to a high school teacher working with troubled youth while navigating the secret violence in his immigrant family’s past.

Set in a public housing project in San Francisco, Lam’s memoir offers an honest look at the challenges and joys of his upbringing. 

Simmons draws out the humanity of her characters, their flaws and failings, their hopes and desires, and their dreams for the future. These stories show that the human capacity for violence, compassion, and love are not bound by time or place.

In a series of intimate essays, Alvarado moves from adolescence into adulthood while grappling with attachments that develop through her family and her ties to the wider world around her while she works as a teacher, writer, and caregiver. Though written from a single woman’s perspective, these essays invite us to reflect on the many roles women play and the social factors that touch upon them. Alvarado’s essays portray a broad world of experience, reflecting on class, race, and poverty in America with emotional depth and sensitivity.

The poems are unselfconscious, and they detail with grace the pleasures and difficulties of aging, and the evolution of personal relationships through a life.

Lori Jakiela's memoir examines both the lives we are born with and the lives we create for ourselves.

In startling images of beauty and violence, Kell creates a haunting world that mirrors our individual and cultural fears. Cage of Lit Glass follows multiple points of view, all haunted by various states of unease and struggle that follow them like specters as they navigate their world. Kell’s poems form blurred narratives and playful experiments from our attempts to build lives from despair. A tense and insightful collection, these works will follow the reader long after the book is finished.