100 Queer Poems

Andrew McMillan's first collection, physical, was the first poetry collection to win the Guardian First Book Award; it also won a Somerset Maugham Award, an Eric Gregory Award, a Northern Writers' Award and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection, playtime, won the inaugural Polari Prize, and his most recent collection is pandemonium. His debut novel, Pity, was published by Canongate in 2024. McMillan is a Senior Lecturer at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche, which won the 2019 Costa Poetry Award and was shortlisted in 2020 for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. In 2021, Flèche was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Chan is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University. Born and raised in Hong Kong, they currently live in Oxford. Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the MacArthur 'Genius Grant' and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently splits his time between western Massachusetts and New York City. KAE TEMPEST has been putting words together since he was a teenager. He has published plays, poetry collections, non-fiction, a Sunday Times-bestselling novel and has released six studio albums. In 2013 Tempest won the Ted Hughes Award, making him the youngest ever poet to receive it. He was named a Next Generation Poet in 2014, a once-in-a-decade honour, and in the same year he received the first of two Mercury Prize nominations. He is the only person to have achieved both accolades. In 2021 he was awarded the Silver Lion in Venice for his work as a playwright and in 2023 he won an Ivor Novello for his songwriting. His books have been translated into multiple languages and published to critical acclaim around the world. He hopes he will continue putting words together for the rest of his life. Audre Lorde was a writer, feminist and civil rights activist - or, as she famously put it, 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet'. Born in New York in 1934, she had her first poem published while she was still in high school. After stints as a factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor, she became a librarian in Manhattan and gradually rose to prominence as a poet, essayist and speaker, anthologised by Langston Hughes, lauded by Adrienne Rich, and befriended by James Baldwin. She was made Poet Laureate of New York State in 1991, when she was awarded the Walt Whitman prize; she was also awarded honorary doctorates from Hunter, Oberlin and Haverford colleges. She died of cancer in 1992, aged 58. Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture's Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936 and was the author of ten books of poetry, seven collections of essays, two plays, a libretto, a novel, a memoir, five children's books, and June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. As a professor at UC Berkeley, Jordan established Poetry for the People, a program to train student teachers to teach the power of poetry from a multicultural worldview. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and her arti...