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

Chelsea Guevara is a U.S.-Salvadorian poet from Salt Lake City, Utah. In 2024, she won the Womxn of the World International Poetry Slam, becoming the first Salvadoran and the first Utahn to earn a national individual slam title. Currently a student in the University of Arizona’s Latin American Studies graduate program, she utilizes her academic research to inform her creative work centering culture, history, memory, and identity. Chelsea’s micro-chapbook Somewhere Over the Border was a finalist for the Gunpowder Press Alta California Chapbook Prize in 2023. You can find her work on Button Poetry, Write About Now Poetry, and Mapping Literary Utah.

Daniel Elias Galicia is the son of Chicana/o activists and educators. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Button Poetry, EcoTheo Review, Ruminate Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith, and more. His chapbook Still Desert was the Runner-Up for the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest (Button Poetry), the 2022 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize (Texas Review Press), and a Finalist for the 2023 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize (Beloit Poetry Journal). He is a Pushcart-nominated poet and a recipient of an Editor’s Choice Award (Relief).

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.

2023 Video Contest Winners & Runners-Up


CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL WINNERS AND FINALISTS IN THE 2023 BUTTON POETRY VIDEO CONTEST
Watch previous winners on our YouTube channel

Rachel Camacho is a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and misfit educator with three acclaimed full-length books of poetry, blud (2017) Into the Dark & Emptying Field (2013) and Pink Elephant (2009, re-released in 2026.)

In 2012, Camacho founded The Pink Door Writing Retreat, an annual intensive held exclusively for non-men writers of color in upstate New York.

Camacho was recently the subject of the podcast We Were Three, from the producers of Serial.

She believes Palestine will be free in her lifetime.

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