LGBT writers responded to the tragic Orlando massacre with a mix of rage and sorrow … read more

“Writers have had a long, contentious, volatile romance with suicide. I searched them out in high school and then college, when my first book of poetry–grim and suicidal–was published. Like many depressed adolescents, I sought out fellow travelers[…]”… read more

“Before there was the Internet, there was Frank O’Hara. We’re just as a culture finally catching up to his manic speed and endlessly divisible attention span”

Event moderator Adam Fitzgerald on the Frank O’Hara Fire Island Pines Poetry Festival…. read more

As David Lehman suggests in his foreword to The Best American Poetry 2012, Mark Doty collects a wide variety of poems that have a mysterious and “uncanny” quality, poems which are almost haunted by the “spirit in the dark.”… read more

New Yorkers have a lot to look forward to in October: leather weather (finally!), oversized sweaters, some of the most inventive and intricate Halloween costumes in the world–and, of course, since 2007, the Academy of American Poets’ annual Poets Forum. Poets Forum is a celebration and examination of the form, where some of the sharpest and most exciting voices in American poetry gather to share their work and discuss their processes. Here’s ten reasons (of many) not to miss this year…… read more

There are plenty of ghosts in New York City. And this PRIDE, we take a measure of what poets are among them. Haunting the halls of queer poetry salons and community centers is an entire generation lost to AIDS. “Art is not living, it is the use of the living” said poet and activist Audre… read more

The 5th Annual Poets Forum, hosted by the Academy of American Poets, kicks off tonight with its Chancellors Reading at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Among the Chancellors participating are queer greats Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, recent National Book Award Finalist Carl Phillips, and Kay Ryan, who–having recently received both a Pulitzer Prize… read more

Need some help wooing your honey this Valentine’s Day? Here are fourteen of our favorite queer love poems, rounded up from LambdaLiterary.org and across the web. Who better to start us off than Sappho? In this fragment, translated by Richard Lattimore, she describes just how much havoc a crush can wreak: “Let me only glance… read more

2010 was a great year for LGBT poetry, bringing us some exciting new voices, books, and trends. As the year comes to an end, here are some of the highlights: This fall seminal poet Mary Oliver, whom The Weekly Standard has described as “among the finest poets the English language has ever produced,” published Swan:… read more

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Ashbery was honored this weekend at the 5th annual Brooklyn Book Festival in New York City. The Brooklyn Book Festival “BoBi” award, given each year to an author whose body of work exemplifies or speaks to the spirit of Brooklyn, was given to Ashbery on Saturday night at the Festival Gala…. read more