Sean Patrick Mulroy

Sean Patrick Mulroy is a writer, actor, visual artist, and musician from the American South, who now lives all over the world. A nationally recognized writer in the US, Sean is a performer, an award winning professor, and earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sean is a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, a 2017-2018 Writer-in-Residence at The Kerouac Project in Orlando Florida, and a 2019 Writer in Residence at Villa Sarkia in Sysma, Finland. He is the author of Hated for the Gods (Button Poetry), Winner of the 2020 Button Poetry Prize.

Hated for the Gods

Sean Patrick Mulroy’s Hated for the Gods invites the reader to embrace their queer heritage with disarming tenderness, and urges them to celebrate the joy of gay sex without shame.

Plaintive and joyous, sexy and ferocious—often all at once—Hated for the Gods is as much a call to action as it is a work of literature. Gorgeously rendered and skillfully constructed both to educate and inspire, Sean Patrick Mulroy’s poetry weaves together stories from his coming of age in the American South of the 1990s with the broader history of gay men in America. The result is a politically radical text that will leave you shocked with all you didn’t know about the history of queer people, and surprised by what you already knew but never could articulate.

A world-renowned poet and award-winning scholar, Mulroy’s work exists in a lineage of fearless gay literature; from Shakespeare to Siken, Genji to Ginsberg. Masterfully intricate, yet effortlessly approachable, by turns hopeful and incendiary, Hated for the Gods, is a must-read for the LGBT+ community and their loved ones.

Praise for Sean Patrick Mulroy

Mulroy makes lively, surprising, moving poems out of his own and our queer past–a life-affirming rescue. I love it!
— Jonathan Ned Katz, author of Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.

HATED FOR THE GODS is an unapologetic, vibrant, radical love letter to queerness. These poems investigate (and excavate) the queer experience throughout history, art, myth, and religion, spanning centuries and cultures to illuminate the violence of erasure and the necessity of the ongoing struggle for equality. Singing with the urgency of a poet fully in his element, Sean Patrick Mulroy charts a path toward self-acceptance and self-liberation filled with love and ache and joy and questioning. Above all else, these poems offer the rare gift of being fully seen.
— Ruth Awad, author of Set to Music a Wildfire

Awards

WINNER of the 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest

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Sean Patrick Mulroy in the Button Store

Hated for the Gods

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