Happy Pub Day to Kristina Percy and Both True!

[waiting on kristina release day material]

Kristina’s Personal Statement about Both True

More about Kristina Percy

Instagram @__kpwrites

Kristina Percy (she/ her) lives with her husband & two young children on Vancouver Island, BC in the traditional territories of the Ligwiłda’xw people. Neither of her degrees have anything to do with creative writing. Her work has been published extensively in her Gmail drafts folder, & you can also find it on Instagram @__kpwrites.

Her debut collection, Both True, was a runner up in the 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming from Button Poetry in Fall 2025.

 

(On |Un-)Becoming is here!
Welcome FreeQuency’s highly anticipated release!

(On |Un-)Becoming is a collection of stories, reflections, forgivenesses and offerings rooted in conversations and conflicts with FreeQuency’s mother, chosen family & other selves. The anti disciplinary project liberates the concept of “transitioning” from the realm of Westernized notions of gender and expands|explores|explodes the concept of (un)becoming in relationship to international Blackness, migration|movement, geographic and corporeal displacement, spiritual|mental health and the ties between personal and communal transformation.

More about FreeQuency

Mwende “FreeQuency” Katwiwa is a Kenyan, Immigrant, Shoga|Queer storyteller, speaker & feeler. The 2018 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, a 2017 TEDWomen speaker and ranked 3rd at the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam, FreeQuency is a highly sought after performer, host, social justice teaching artist and workshop leader. Rooted in various global communities & having spent their life at the intersection of arts, education and activism, they and|or their work in Reproductive Justice, #BlackLivesMatter organizing & activism, LGBTQ+ advocacy and writing have been featured on The Independent, the New York Times, OkayAfrica, Upworthy, TEDx, For Harriet, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, Everyday Feminism, & other outlets.

 

Hailey Tran’s an everyday occurrence Is Here Now!

Hailey Tran’s Personal Statement On Their Newest Release

“When I started writing poetry, I never would have believed it possible to write a book of my own. With all of the excitement in the universe, I introduce you to my very first collection of poetry, an everyday occurrence!

Writing these poems challenged me in being unabashedly myself and I can not wait for you to read them. The collection holds up a mirror to my toughest experiences and the journey to overcome them. There is no amount of thanks I could give to my family, friends, editor and community in encouraging me to put my stories on paper.

Lastly, thank you to Button Poetry for seeing me, for your trust in this project, and giving my words the legs to run out into the world.”

Buy and read the book here: https://buttonpoetry.com/product/an-everyday-occurrence/

More about Hailey Tran

Website | Instagram @hails.mt

Hailey M. Tran is a DC-based and Lowell-raised dreamer. They are a queer Asian American Latina spoken word and performance poet, who believes in the transformative power of storytelling and art.

Hailey has their BA in Political Science and Social Work from Simmons University and is currently a high school history teacher. Passionate about helping students understand their ancestral memories, Tran’s pedagogy uses the creative process to interrogate structural and interpersonal violence. They strive to help their students to better understand racial, gendered, and queer identities, and connect with their community at large.

Hailey has competed in MassLEAP’s Louder Than a Bomb with FreeVerse! and the 2018 Brave New Voices Festival where they advanced to Final Stage. They have served as a Youth Spoken Word Leader for the Boston cohort. Hailey’s debut collection, an everyday occurrence, is forthcoming by Button Poetry.

 

WINNER of the 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest Mickie Kennedy’s GLANDSCAPES is here!

Read Mickie’s Personal Statement here:

“In 2024, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It was the kind of news that rearranges your body, your mind, your sense of time. I turned to poetry—not as therapy, but as a way to stay honest while everything shifted.

Glandscapes came out of that year: diagnosis, scans, side effects, surgery. But it’s not just a cancer book. It’s about sex, aging, identity, and what it means to inhabit a queer body when that body suddenly feels unfamiliar. These poems are messy, intimate, and sometimes funny. I didn’t write them to be brave. I wrote them because I didn’t know what else to do.

Button Poetry helped bring this work into the world, and I’m so grateful. Working with Button Poetry has been an incredible experience—collaborative, thoughtful, and deeply respectful of my voice. From the back-and-forth on edits to the cover design process, I felt fully seen and supported every step of the way. 

Holding this book feels like reclaiming something.“

“Glandscapes is an incredibly moving collection, rich with the kind of up-close intimacy that covers such wide ground — parentage, beloveds, the self, survival and not. It builds a rich interior world that is clear and distinct to the speaker, but not isolating to you, the reader, who might want to walk through that world for a while. This book is a triumph, is massively generous, and also just plainly a pleasure to read.”

Hanif Abdurraqib, author of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much

More about Mickie:

Website | Instagram @MickiePoet | Facebook @MickiePoet | Twitter @MickiePoet

Mickie Kennedy is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Sun and elsewhere. His first book of poetry Worth Burning will be published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2026. His Button Poetry Chapbook Prize winning collection, Glandscapes, will be available in Fall 2025. Follow him on social media @MickiePoet or his website mickiekennedy.com.

"I could tell he wished I knew.
I told him about the kids, about Randy.
Six months later, his obituary.
No service, no cause of death.
He never mentioned a lover, or the night
we slept together, all those years ago,"

- Final Snow of the Season, Glandscapes
Purchase Glandscapes Here

Happy Release Day to Chelsea Guevara and CIPOTA!

From Chelsea about Cipota

My book Cipota is written and edited and available to the world today. It is a collection of stories from Salvi girlhood in the diaspora, notes on my own navigation of life and relationships, and lessons on becoming more sure of myself while also being less sure about the future.

This book is a product of love made possible by my families and communities who pour into me everyday, and I’m in giddy shock every time I read my name on the spine.

Working with Button Poetry to develop this collection has been so much dreamier than I could have ever wished for. I’m so grateful to work with a team that truly cares about my relationship to the work, and has provided their constant support, expertise, and vision into making this real and beautiful.

To everyone who has been a part of this process with me, I love you and thank you so much.

To anyone who asks me how I’m doing today, I’m releasing my first book 🙂 and you should get a copy or two here <3 – Chelsea Guevara

More about Cipota

Chelsea Guevara’s Cipota breathes a lineage into a song—making music of ancestral memory: dirges of heartbreak and generational trauma, anthems of rage and reclamation, ballads of love and homecoming.

Guevara’s voice enchants as she delves into history, ancestry, and the self—reaching for a lineage that has been battered by strife and strangled by colonialism. She moves through place and memory with deft skill and earnest humanity. Cipota examines the grief of culture lost, of a home you’ve been separated from, one that doesn’t truly feel like yours. 

Cipota is a beating heart that demands to be heard. You will be rapt from start to finish.

Get your copy today!

Buy CIPOTA

Happy Release Day to Daniel Elias Galicia and STILL DESERT!

Statement from Author:

“STILL DESERT is a collection of poems about the border: a place where life is too often stunned into stillness by tragedy and the crisis that is the border itself.

In that stillness, how do we seek peace, rights for humans and animals, reconciliation, hope, survival, and healing and renewal? In these poems, racism, xenophobia, hatred, bigotry, loss, and death clash against our universal longing for love, fulfillment, empowerment, and a sense of belonging and home.

From this tension emerges a poetic desire to find a painful yet important beauty in the lived experiences of this region’s people. The collection moves through a landscape scorched by the desert sun’s oppressive heat, where each poem searches for relief, redemption, and the rare, precious gift of rain.”

More about Still Desert:

Finalist for the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Prize, Daniel Elias Galicia’s debut collection, Still Desert sings with histories both haunting and enchanting.

Artistically and linguistically dynamic, Galicia’s poems weave personal and historical narratives of immigration, assimilation, and Mexican heritage. Still Desert lingers in the spaces between borders and crossings, breathing in rich, tactile environments and raw, complex emotions. With a musical rage and a sacred love, Galicia speaks to unsung lineages and the violences found before, during, and after crossing the border.

Ash Wednesday at Ricky’s
Waiting

Like what you see? Get your copy today!

Still Desert

 

Happy Publication Day to Forgotten Necessities!

BUY NOW

 

 

“I’m not mad I sold my youth, just that I sold it so cheap.”

Jared Singer in Forgotten Necessities
 

In his anticipated second collection, Forgotten Necessities, Jared Singer wears love and loss on his skin.

 

Through spell-bindingly immersive storytelling, Singer digs to the roots of our deepest woes and cradles our joys with utmost tenderness. Intimacy and vulnerability ache across the time and space of these poems. Forgotten Necessities holds its sadness sacredly and builds shrines to the hope that follows. Persistent reminders of the small kindnesses that make a life meaningful to the living and the dead. A brilliant follow-up to his debut, Singer’s Forgotten Necessities is itself a necessity, a haunting that heals.

 

Check out a performance from Jared Singer down below!

 

 

 

About Jared:

Facebook @JaredSingerwriter

Jared Singer is an Audio Engineer and poet who lives in Secaucus, NJ. While he may have physically grown up with his peers, he has never forgotten the imagination, magic, and nerdiness that were cornerstones of his childhood. He hopes to remind others of these more creative times. He has also appeared on the Indiefeed Performance Poetry Podcast. He has represented New York eight times at the National Slam level, including two final stage appearances at the National Poetry Slam. Jared has long believed in the healing power of the mountains, kittens, and lists of three.

SHOP JARED
 
 

 

It’s Publication Day for Wild/Hurt!

Snag a copy of Meg Ford’s book.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Wild/Hurt by Meg Ford takes the abstract ‘journey’ of trauma recovery and makes it concrete with interactive poetics.

As a reader we are immersed in multiple paths that mirror the choices, experiences, and struggles one makes when reclaiming themselves in the face of abuse.

While being intensely personal, Wild/Hurt moves resonantly through memory and healing in a way that can speak to many survivors. Through its hardships and suffering, this collection comes to realize and love the intimate parts of itself. Ford’s work encompasses a survivor’s entire personhood–growing from their trauma, discovering and celebrating queerness, and living and loving with disability.

Wild/Hurt is a rich, heartfelt collection that makes the reading an experience, telling a new, remarkable story with each reread.

What stories will you tell?

Wild adventure and hurt feelings await!

ABOUT FORD

Meg Ford is a queer writer from New Jersey who was voted Most Likely to Leave and Never Come Back. They are a two-time National Poetry Slam semi-finalist with the Boston Poetry Slam Team and received their MFA from Emerson College. Their work has previously appeared in The Rumpus, NAILED, PANK, and the We Will Be Shelter Anthology from Write Bloody. Meg can most often be found hanging out with the cat at your party.

SHOP MEG

It’s Publication Day for Bubble Gum Stadium!

Snag a copy of Jalen Eutsey’s book.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A home is made by the memories it holds, and in Bubble Gum Stadium, Jalen Eutsey makes us his house guests.

Flush with the rich colors of South Florida, these poems immerse you in a history of a place and its people. Bubble Gum Stadium grips the reader with its immersive recollections and starkly beautiful language. We’re given a scrapbook black community and coming-of age, so lovingly rendered in the backdrop of West Perrine.

Memory offered as a gift, one Eutsey asks us to treasure; after all, what happens when it’s gone?

ABOUT EUTSEY

Jalen Eutsey was a 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He received his MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He has been the recipient of a Rubys Artist Grant and a Hatty Fitts Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Best New Poets, Nashville Review, and Poetry Northwest. He was born and raised in Miami.

SHOP JALEN

It’s Publication Day for Shapeshifter!

Grab a copy of L.E. Bowman’s book.

ABOUT THE BOOK

L.E. Bowman’s latest collection Shapeshifter aches with the soft sorrows and hard-won joys of life.

Melodic and introspective, Bowman’s poems converse–struggling with grief and hopelessness while fighting for love and recovery. Shapeshifter grounds the reader in the body, ever transforming with age and experience. Reckoning with self-image, heartbreak, and motherhood, this collection emphasizes the beauty in mundanity–the journey that is life.

Embracing the fear of an ever-changing and vulnerable existence, while encouraging the reader to live in spite and because of that fear, Shapeshifter is a searing work that cannot be missed!

ABOUT BOWMAN

Lauren E. Bowman is the author of three poetry collections, The Evolution of a Girl (Black Castle Media Group), What I Learned from the Trees (Button Poetry), and her latest, Shapeshifter (Button Poetry).

Lauren’s work often delves into the intricate relationship between humans and nature, and how these often overlooked, everyday interactions affect us as individuals, families, and communities. She also focuses heavily on all facets of womanhood, including the shifting roles and definitions that we face as we change and age.

Being a fulltime working mother and a parttime writer, Lauren pulls much of her inspiration from the capricious lives we tackle every day. Through sharing her own struggles with relationships and self-acceptance, she seeks to encourage others to learn from and rise above their own difficulties and doubts, and to find a place of reflection, empowerment, and growth.

SHOP BOWMAN!