About the Book
A luminous anthology of 100 queer poems - from W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Bishop to Carol Ann Duffy and Ocean Vuong - curated by two prize-winning stars.
Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan's luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past. Featuring Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Ocean Vuong, Carol Ann Duffy, Kae Tempest and many more.
* A Guardian Best Poetry Book of the Year *
* Shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards *
Encompassing both the flowering of queer poetry over the past few decades and the poets who came before and broke new ground, 100 Queer Poems presents an electrifying range of writing from the twentieth century to the present day.
Questioning and redefining what we mean by a 'queer' poem, you'll find inside classics by Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew and June Jordan, central contemporary figures such as Mark Doty, Jericho Brown, Carol Ann Duffy, Kei Miller, Kae Tempest, Natalie Diaz and Ocean Vuong, alongside thrilling new voices including Chen Chen, Richard Scott, Harry Josephine Giles, Verity Spott and Jay Bernard.
Curated by two widely acclaimed poets, Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan, 100 Queer Poems moves from childhood and adolescence to forging new homes and relationships with our chosen families, from urban life to the natural world, from explorations of the past to how we find and create our future selves.
'Abundantly rich and rewarding...capturing how queer poets and their work speak to one another across generations' Attitude
'More than a landmark volume... An anthology that marks the present moment and ushers in a new one' Okechukwu Nzelu, author of Here Again Now
About the Author :
Ocean Vuong (Contributor)
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 (Contributor)
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 (Contributor)
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.
Mary Oliver (Contributor)
Mary Oliver was born in rural Ohio in 1935. The author of more than 15 collections of poetry and essays, she is one of America's best-selling poets. Among her many honours, she was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive (1983) and a National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, Volume One (1992). She received the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. For four decades, she lived on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with her partner Molly Malone Cook, writing while walking outside with her notebook.
Sean Hewitt (Contributor)
Sean 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 (Contributor)
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 articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms., Essence, and The Nation. She died of breast cancer in 2002.
Kaveh Akbar (Contributor)
Kaveh Akbar is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell, and has received honours such as a Levis Reading Prize and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in low-residency programs at Warren Wilson and Randolph Colleges.
Jay Bernard (Contributor)
Jay Bernard is the author of the pamphlets Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (Tall Lighthouse, 2008), English Breakfast (Math Paper Press, 2013) and The Red and Yellow Nothing (Ink Sweat & Tears Press, 2016), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2017. A film programmer at BFI Flare and an archivist at Statewatch, they also participated in 'The Complete Works II' project in 2014 and in which they were mentored by Kei Miller. Jay was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2005 and a winner of SLAMbassadors UK spoken word championship. In 2019 Jay was selected by Jackie Kay as one of Britain's ten best BAME writers for the British Council and National Centre for Writing's International Literature Showcase. Their poems have been collected in Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009), The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011), Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014) and Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poets (Bloodaxe, 2014).
Langston Hughes (Contributor)
Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the most influential and acclaimed American writers of the twentieth century. A renowned poet from a young age, Hughes' first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published when he was just 24. He would go on to publish more than thirty-five books, including his award-winning debut novel, Not Without Laughter, and the short story collection, The Ways of White Folks. His widely-read journalism and nonfiction became important documents in the support and promotion of the civil rights movement.
Andrew McMillan (External Editor)
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 (External Editor)
Mary Jean Chan is the author of Fl che, 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, Fl che 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.
Review :
The year's most notable anthology is 100 Queer Poems, edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan. It has at its core a generous and expansive definition of queerness that finds room for poets such as WH Auden, John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop, while including modern, innovative voices such as Verity Spott and Harry Josephine Giles. With a thematic arrangement ranging across relationships and families, the urban and natural world, and queer histories and futures, there is a great sense of kinship running through the poems
A diverse and gratifying new anthology of LGBTQ+ verse... this is an abundantly rich and rewarding collection, capturing how queer poets and their work speak to one another across generations
100 Queer Poems is more than a landmark volume; it offers a golden opportunity for readers and writers to check in, refresh, reconnect. Old favourites sit alongside emerging stars and some surprises, gifting us with an anthology that marks the present moment and ushers in a new one
