“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."

Reid's experimental work challenges societal norms, particularly the family as a political construct while reflecting on the trans experiences of a queer Black woman. The poems grapple with oppressive systems of separation and colonial legacies, rejecting extractive, empire-driven paradigms, and gender essentialism. Within her collection, Reid envisions alternative, ethical ways of being, rooted in unity and wholeness and finds kinship with the rhythms and lifeways of the natural world—soil, stars, and water. 

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.”

A love letter to Miami and a meditation on fatherhood, Self-Portrait as the “i” in Florida paints a vivid portrait of contemporary South Florida in all its contradictions and beauty. 

Selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, Cunningham’s second collection weaves together ecological and familial landscapes, capturing both the spectacle—burning sugarcane fields, snake farms, chaotic highways—and the daily rituals that bind a family: school drop-offs, sick days, and small kindnesses. Blending formalist and free verse, the book becomes both an inquiry into belonging and a celebration of the essential everyday moments that define a life. 

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

“Beautifully strange and incredibly satisfying.” —Kristen Arnett

Winner of the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize, these lyrical, haunting stories invite us to question the stories we tell ourselves and to imagine other paths—joyful, whimsical, even absurd—through the world. 

A wife finds herself literally shrinking in her house, day by day; a mother recalls the surreal day when her infant daughter survives a close encounter with a bear; and, inside her lover’s heart, a woman discovers a secret nightclub populated by all the women he’s loved and left. 

In the worlds, Woods conjures, childhood memories ripple through adult lives, and characters test the limits of their self-created realities. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe urges us to contemplate how we can escape loneliness and heartbreak and live on our own terms. 

"Feminist and humanist, the vision here is both passionate and compassionate. It's a page-turner to be sure." —Kazim Ali

Betsy Fagin’s self-driving reimagines the American road trip through the lens of a contemporary woman’s journey. 

Rooted in the tradition of the on-the-road narrative, Fagin’s poems interrogate the foundations of freedom, representation, and privilege while dismantling romanticized myths of Western expansion and the cis, white, male-dominated tales of the open road. Through sharp, playful, and incisive verse, Fagin celebrates Black, queer, feminist presence and futures, confronting the erasures and delusions in America’s frequently told stories. 

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.

Winner of the 2024 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, this large-hearted personal essay collection by Ren Cedar Fuller invites us to imagine a more generous way of being in the world, drawing on Fuller’s experiences as a daughter, sister, mother, teacher, and patient. 

A father’s hurtful rigidity becomes slightly more comprehensible when viewed through a lens of neurodivergence, and a mother’s well-timed lie allows her children to see an escape from fundamentalist strictures. Parents build support systems for their transgender child, and a disability that makes it impossible for the author to cry tears opens up new paths for expressing emotions. 

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.