Queer Voices

Since its beginnings in 1993, the Queer Voices reading series has featured both emerging and established Minnesota-based writers of the LGBTQIA+ community. With a track record of more than twenty years, the series has become a national model and one of Minnesota’s most important literary institutions. It is reputed to be the longest-running curated queer reading series in the country.

In this volume, series curators John Medeiros and Andrea Jenkins and facilitator Lisa Marie Brimmer present the finest poetry, fiction, and nonfiction pieces by the presenters. Their work, generated and performed in a powerful space of understanding, explores the material of life without internal or external censorship. Living, loving, working, learning, playing, reflecting, knowing, inventing, and being—these magnificent queer voices affirm the importance of civil literacy and the power of vulnerability.

Riding Shotgun

Edited by Kathryn Kysar

With honesty and extraordinary self-knowledge, twenty-one accomplished authors illuminate the mother-daughter relationship–intimate, complicated, loving, flawed–with humor and clarity.

A group of America’s celebrated literary women have come together to tackle a topic close to their hearts: Mom. These highly personal yet often universal stories offer windows into those influential mother-daughter moments that have forever shaped the lives and perspectives of the writers, powerful women–authors, spokespeople, scholars, teachers, and some mothers themselves.

In true tales of startling candor and rich insight, these and many other talented writers reflect on the women who raised them, revealing hard work and hardship, successes and failures, love and anger–mothers and daughters.

Oh, Baby: True Stories about Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love

Edited by Lee Gutkind and Alice Bradley

In these 23 original stories, mothers and fathers from all walks of life–straight, gay, single, surrogate, biological, adoptive–explore the challenges and rewards of parenthood. Here, among other adventures, parents fall hopelessly in love with newborns, secretly fear having made huge mistakes, race to finish birthing at home before the paramedics arrive, struggle with the bureaucracy of international adoption, despair of ever getting a one-year-old to nap, are nearly broken by colic, encounter other judgmental parents in birthing class, learn how to parent children with special needs, and more. Together, these thoughtful, searing, often hilarious essays map the grand (and sometimes terrifying) journey that begins with each new life.

My Red Couch and Other Stories on Seeking a Feminist Faith

Edited by Claire Bischoff and Rachel Gaffron, My Red Couch and Other Stories on Seeking a Feminist Faith includes the voices of two-dozen young people between the ages of 20-35 who seek to participate in the continuing conversation about what it means to be a feminist and a Christian in our contemporary culture.

Read an excerpt from Elizabeth’s essay, “The Darker Womb.”

Views from the Loft: A Portable Writer’s Workshop

Edited by Daniel Slager

Teachers, exercises, mentors, critiques, humor, and inspiration: these form the fuel all writers need when they get down to work every day. For decades the Loft Literary Center has provided this fuel to an enormous community of writers. Views from the Loft brings together the collected wisdom of that community — its authors, students, and editors — giving anyone the tools and inspiration necessary to thrive in the writing life. A who’s who of writers on writing ranging from the National Book Award-winning poet Mark Doty to Newbery medal-winning children’s author Kate DiCamillo, and touching on issues as delicate as the representation of family in memoir and as hilarious as a “sad-epiphany poem” mad lib for frustrated poets, this book is an essential collection of crucial tips and challenging questions for everyone who puts pen to page. The essays and interviews in this book include superstar writers like Rick Bass, Michael Cunningham, Grace Paley, Susan Power, Susan Straight, Marilyn Hacker, and many, many more.

The Orison Anthology, 2016

Edited by Luke Hankins, Nathan Poole and Karen Tucker

The Orison Anthology aims to not only fill, but expand, the space left by the absence of The Best American Spiritual Writing series. In addition to reprinted material, each year the anthology will also include new, previously unpublished works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry by the winners of the Orison Anthology Awards, judged by different prominent writers each year.

Contributors to the 2016 volume include Vandana Khanna, Jane Hirshfield, Carl Phillips, Alison Gopnik, Christian Wiman, Kaveh Akbar, Li-Young Lee, Molly Reid, Franz Wright, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and many others.

Blessed Bi Spirit: Bisexual People of Faith

Edited by Debra Kolodny

Reflecting a wide spectrum of religious tradition and spiritual paths–including Buddhist, Hindu, Pagan, 12-step, Christian and Jewish–over 30 contributors speak about the intersections of their faith practice and their bisexuality.