WINNER OF THE 2026 AMERICAN LEGACY AWARDThe Book of Spells is a collection of poems that believes the world around us is shaped and reshaped by language and that changing our language is a revolutionary act of political and social magic that can replace long-standing destructive agreements with the benignity of loving clarity.This collection of spells begins by following the tracks of a mythical creature composed of language and bl...

Snake: Second Wind continues the apocalyptic narrative introduced in its prequel, Snake, where all organic forms are destroyed by the planet Earth in a retributive act of self defense. From these destroyed forms the genderless eternal voice of snake is born. In Second Wind the poems—with choral asides—explore the possibility that life is only an agreed upon illusion, only real within a certain narrow bandwidth in the sense fog is created by a confluence of heat a...

Gary Lemons’s The Weight of Light breaks down the wall between poet and reader and invites us to meditate with him on all things beautiful and ugly, in a way that makes us proud to be a part of the world. Lemons explores human and nonhuman relationships, dissecting them just enough to give us a glimpse before sealing them back up and tucking them into the pages. He shows us the painful, the heartbreaking, the fearful—but pairs them with the magnificent and the joyful in such a way...

Snake—the Hunger Sutras is the third book in the Snake Quartet. By now snake has carried the lost voices—from the smallest single celled whisper to the bellow of more complex creatures as she wanders the empty Earth. Thousands—maybe millions of years—listening--while also searching for the clues in the ruins that when puzzled into insight become the beginning movement in the opera of life returning. The clues are fossils embedded in the archeological remains of st...

Original Grace is the last book in the Snake Quartet. In it, the journey from destruction leads through the darkened rooms of an enormous house where occasionally outside the windows creatures past, present, and future appear—asking for help or solace or trying to break the glass to get in. But the house is made of poetry and is unassailable unlike those who live in it.By this time, Snake has undergone the transformations from sole survivor into the mythic voice of...

Womanism Rising concludes Layli Maparyan’s three-book exploration of womanist studies. The collection showcases new work by emerging womanist authors who expand the womanist idea while extending womanism to new sites, new problems, and new audiences.Maparyan organizes the contributions around five key ideas. The first section looks at womanist self-care as a life-saving strategy. The second examines healing the Earth as a prerequisite to healing ourselves. In Part Three, t...

Contemporary research on the lives and experiences of women of color tends to neglect the influence of women’s perceived access to voice as they manage tensions related to race, class, and gender. Underserved Women of Color, Voice, and Resistance: Claiming a Seat at the Table contributes to current dialogues that construct Black Feminist Theory as active, critical engagement within dominant American institutions that oppress women of color in their daily lives. Women of color face unique s...

Over the last generation, the womanist idea--and the tradition blooming around it--has emerged as an important response to separatism, domination, and oppression. Gary L. Lemons gathers a diverse group of writers to discuss their scholarly and personal experiences with the womanist spirit of women of color feminisms. Feminist and womanist-identified educators, students, performers, and poets model the powerful ways that crossing borders of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation-state a...

Considering the violent and deadly experiences of racism in the United States during this contemporary moment, there remains a critical need for demonstrative dialogues for social justice. Progressive anti-racist allies—across differences of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability—must continue to join together to enact strategies devoted to the eradication of racism. Ways to advocate life survival for Black Indigenous People of Color in the U.S. must be actively engaged. Particularly ...

The book presents a revolutionary approach to higher education based on empathy, trust and collaboration. It describes how people can be brought together across cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, class, ability and other divides in a spirit of love and liberation. The setting for the book is "The Bible as Literature" course taught at the University of South Florida by Dr. Gary L. Lemons. The teaching,learning and writing experiences and methods described here can be deployed not ...

The Power and Freedom of Black Feminist and Womanist Pedagogy: Still Woke celebrates and reaffirms the power of Black feminist and womanist pedagogies and practices in university classrooms. Employing autocritography (through personal reflection, research, and critical analysis), the contributors to the volume boldly tell groundbreaking stories of their teaching experiences and their evolving relationships to Black feminist and womanist theory and criticism. From their own unique ...

Women’s studies programs and departments face ongoing fall-out from an economic crisis in higher education. Taking the form of budget-cuts, reduction of faculty lines and other resource allocations, for some programs and departments it has meant at best, a loss of disciplinary autonomy through consolidation, and at worst, academic foreclosure. Feminist Solidarity at the Crossroads articulates a politics of commitment, hope, and possibility wrought in the coming-together of a group...