Kevin Simmonds' poems travel across his native United States and all over the world - from a Deep South spiritual's lamentation, to gay men is a Bangkok sex club, to competitive hot-dog eating.

Poetry. LGBT Studies. The first anthology of its kind, with poets representing several countries (the United States, Singapore, Korea, Australia, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia, Japan and elsewhere), COLLECTIVE BRIGHTNESS gathers over 100 established and emerging contemporary LGBTIQ poets writing from and about various faiths, religions and spiritual traditions. Says Rigoberto Gonzalez of National Book Critics Circle, "COLLECTIVE BRIGHTNESS sheds a shining light on a journey that no longer takes place in the dark. The glory of holding Kevin Simmonds's anthology in one's hands is that it burns as the sacred text of our queer times: heavy with burden, luminous with hope."

In Ota Benga under My Mother's Roof, Carrie Allen McCray (1913-2008) uses poignant and personal verse to trace the ill-fated life of the Congolese pygmy who was famously exhibited in the Bronx Zoo in 1906 before being taken in by the McCray family of Lynchburg, Virginia. Rooted in the rich historical and autobiographic context of her own experiences with Benga, McCray offers compelling, dexterous poems that place Benga's story within the racial milieu of the early twentieth century as the burgeoning science of social anthropology worked to classify humans based on race and culture. The theme of this book is a study of humanity, of people of all kinds, in which Benga's vitality becomes the measure against which everyone is measured. With poems that revel in African American signifying, spirituality, and traditional storytelling, McCray's collection establishes a sincere legacy for Ota Benga as she shares her friend's harrowing tale with new generations.

Leontyne Price remains one of the twentieth century's most revered opera singers and, notably, the first African American to achieve such international acclaim. In movements encompassing poetry and prose, writer and musician Kevin Simmonds explores Price as an icon, a diva, a woman, and a patriot-and himself as a fan, a budding singer, and a gay man-through passages that move polyphonically through the contested spaces of Black identity, Black sound, Black sensibility, and Black history. Structured operatically into overture, acts, and postlude, The Monster I Am Today guides the reader through associative shifts from arias like 'weather events' and Price's forty-two-minute ovation to memories of Simmonds's coming of age in New Orleans. As he melds lyric forms with the biography of one of classical music's greatest virtuosos, Simmonds composes a duet that spotlights Price's profound influence on him as a person and an artist: 'That's how I hear: Her.'

Ghost Fishing is the first anthology to focus solely on poetry with an eco-justice bent. A culturally diverse collection entering a field where nature poetry anthologies have historically lacked diversity, this book presents a rich terrain of contemporary environmental poetry with roots in many cultural traditions. Eco-justice poetry is poetry born of deep cultural attachment to the land and poetry born of crisis. Aligned with environmental justice activism and thought, eco-justice poetry defines environment as "the place we work, live, play, and worship." This is a shift from romantic notions of nature as a pristine wilderness outside ourselves toward recognition of the environment as home: a source of life, health, and livelihood. Ghost Fishing is arranged by topic at key intersections between social justice and the environment such as exile, migration, and dispossession; war; food production; human relations to the animal world; natural resources and extraction; environmental disaster; and cultural resilience and resistance. This anthology seeks to expand our consciousness about the interrelated nature of our experiences and act as a starting point for conversation about the current state of our environment.