Literature

Sometimes you are reading a book—not even one by a well-known transphobic children’s author—and are struck, halfway through or near the end, by a bit of transphobia. Sometimes it’s load-bearing: Both Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan end with revelations that their villain characters are caricatures of trans masculinity

Like many of you, I wake up each morning with the feeling that they’re coming for us. But then I think, they have always come for the queers. And we have always, throughout human history, stood watch all night over the fire. We have always taken care of each other, and we will keep on

“Reader, I Gained Weight”: On Eating Disorders and Romance by Katherine J. Chen I had forgotten the taste of bread. Of salmon and chicken. Of chocolate and figs. My tongue held the memory of these foods, of a cube of Kobe beef so tender that it felt a profanity to chew, of a spoonful of

A Serial Killer Walks Into a Bookstore The Last Reader I’m just sitting down at a table at the back of the bookstore café with a stack of books and an iced coffee, and the woman at the next table, thirtyish, dreadlocks, librarian glasses, nose ring, leans over and says, “Skip that one.” With her

I grew up in a small southern town. The models I had for queerness were people on television, living glamorous lives in New York City—lives totally removed from the farmlands, marshes, and forests that surrounded my home. One day, desperate for a nearer, more intimate model, I went online and searched, “Can animals be queer?”

Every Creature in the Galapagos Has a Mate Except Me Louise Marburg Share article An excerpt from Fancy Meeting You by Louise Marburg On the splintery old dock where we wait for the flotilla of Zodiacs that will ferry us out to the Galapagos Magic, a sea lion lazes in the sun, apparently fast asleep.

Bobuq Sayed’s début, No God but Us, reinvents the modern American Abroad novel––the story, now over a century old, of Americans departing the US and crossing an ocean to find freedom and growth that they could not access at home. From Langston Hughes to Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin to Garth Greenwell, the American Abroad novel

For the last several years as Electric Literature’s Managing Editor, grant writing has been a component of my job description. For those unfamiliar with the work, it is almost entirely an exercise in articulating and appropriately packaging the organization’s best features. As a result, I can, upon request, reel off a list of Electric Lit’s

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Upflow by Diego Gerard Morrison, which will be published on October 27, 2026 by Split/Lip Press. You can pre-order your copy here. Mexico City’s water system is the costliest and most absurd on the planet. A series of dams in neighboring states hydro-elevate water past drought-stricken communities before water

“Women, in Color” by Neela Vaswani 1. I had a neighbor whose husband shouted. I suppose the husband was my neighbor too, but I didn’t want him to be. Once home from work, he let loose, shouting between Hindi and a Garhwali dialect I couldn’t follow, a few phrases settling in my ear: the apathy

Between 1910 to 1970, millions of African Americans left the South in search of greater opportunities for freedom, rights, and economic mobility. Due to sheer scale, this human movement became known as the Great Migration. Richard Wright, one of the twentieth century’s seminal writers, was among those millions and described the experience in his 1945

Angel, Those Wings Look Ridiculous on You Heaven Being All Ice Now, Sing Me, Sister, Your Little Song of Fire I.The green bùbá of my country feltsilly in that spectral white of heaven. But it wasall Border Control would allow—the clothon my neck, futile against a furyof snow that did not falllike water off a

Researching my debut novel, The Maidenheads, which is set in the DC music scene from the late 1990s until 2012, sent me down some curious rabbit holes. I toured backstage at venues in DC, read all I could about the DC punk scene of the 1980s and 1990s, and listened to so much music from

Steven Reigns and I had been emailing for months. As I prepared for the release of my debut poetry collection, writers and editors from multiple regions of the queer writing universe strongly encouraged me to reach out to Steven. This was partially due to the similarities in our work; Steven and I are both writing

The Girl We Locked in the Trunk Is Very High Maintenance Mack Gelber Share article “Driving Through Pennsylvania” by Mack Gelber We’ve been driving through Pennsylvania for almost two months. People give us stunned looks when we tell them: “How long?” When they ask what brings us through, we tell them we’re traveling children’s entertainers,

All writing, at some level, grows out of obsession—the need to get our most intense and unwieldy feelings down on paper so that we might begin to see them clearly, or persuade others that our passions matter. But sometimes the obsession is right on the surface of the plot—is the plot. An obsession makes a

The Gothic is a genre with recognizable tropes: witches and vampires, haunted houses and cobwebby tombs. It’s eerie, it’s morbid, it’s campy and over the top. When I was writing my novel Immersions, based on the fairy tale “Bluebeard,” I wanted to write into this Gothic tradition, so I included a big creepy house, a

“The Last Analog Childhood,” an excerpt from My Bad by Hugh Ryan Señora was my favorite teacher for the first half of seventh grade, one of the few who didn’t seem to hate spending her wild and precious days getting tweens to care about something. She had us write skits where the characters from Beverly