A prize-winning poetry collection that delves into the dark wood of the digital underworld: "Impressive . . . thought-provoking." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)What is the deep web? A locked door. A tool for oppression and for revolution. "An emptying drain, driven by gravity." And in Patrick Johnson's Gatekeeper—selected by Khaled Mattawa as the winner of the 2019 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—it is the place where connection is darkly tran...

Inspired by true events, Splinters is an American family tragedy infused with love and hope.After witnessing a horrific murder by their own mother in rural West Virginia, brilliant young Gerald and his baby sister Stephanie become orphans and find very different fates. Stephanie is quickly adopted, while Gerald languishes in a series of schools for boys. Eventually Gerald joins the Army and is recruited for intelligence work in a secret facility, where he becomes addicted to stimul...

Thomas Johnson's latest novel launches a gripping two-book dystopian saga: Escape from Apidae.Apidae is a perfect world. This hive society has been engineered with precision and populated by carefully designed citizens known as hive units. Every aspect of life is regulated: ideal health, flawless physiques, uniform appearances, standardized heights, and controlled intellects. Apidae stands for humanity's vision of ultimate superiority....

E. Patrick Johnson's Honeypot opens with the fictional trickster character Miss B. barging into the home of Dr. EPJ, informing him that he has been chosen to collect and share the stories of her people. With little explanation, she whisks the reluctant Dr. EPJ away to the women-only world of Hymen, where she serves as his tour guide as he bears witness to the real-life stories of queer Black women throughout the American South. The women he meets come from all walks of life and re...

THIRTY-NINE SIXTY - A ROMANTICCHRISTMAS THRILLEROn a frigid December day, sixty-six hours before Christmas, Aedan O'Beirne's wife, Ciara, and their five-year-old son, Colin, disappear. Aedan discovers that he has until the first second of Christmas Day to find them, or he will lose his family forever.Set in Chicagoland, this absorbing and suspenseful tale launches readers into Aedan's surprise-filled world, ...

Reviving Ezra is a fictional novel that challenges American believers, educates Western believers, and admonishes the entire body of Christ about what many members of the body of Christ face throughout the world in relation to persecution, martyrdom, and oppression. It not only highlights the plight of persecuted people, but it is also rich in true worship. The novel takes readers through the cost of revival and what is needed to revive a community, a state, and a nation. In this novel, Ez...

Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and et...

Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities — all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson’s work vividly enriches the historical record of ...

A groundbreaking study of the connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in American literature and US slave culture.Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveho...

While over the past decade a number of scholars have done significant work on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities, this volume is the first to collect this groundbreaking work and make black queer studies visible as a developing field of study in the United States. Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and poli...

The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of st...

Giving voice to a population too rarely acknowledged, Sweet Tea collects more than sixty life stories from black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the South. E. Patrick Johnson challenges stereotypes of the South as “backward” or “repressive” and offers a window into the ways black gay men negotiate their identities, build community, maintain friendship networks, and find sexual and life partners — often in spaces and activities that appear to be antigay. Ultimately, S...