Gay poems for red states
Gay Poems for Red States
No one will protect you. Months after being named the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. announced his judgment to leave the public school system. His career as a high academy English teacher had spanned more than a decade but ended abruptly—another casualty of the harsh and dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination that is creeping back into the halls of government and the homes of Americans. At the commencement of Carver's career, an administrator warned him about discussing his otherwise openly gay identity at work: "No one will protect you, including me." A new administration allowed for more release, but the initial warning eventually rang true. School officials failed repeatedly to address harassment of students and of Carver himself, until he could no longer endure such a purposeful deterioration of human rights. While Carver's testimony before the Dwelling of Representatives brought much-needed attention to the need for protections for Homosexual people in schools, the damage was done.
In Gay Poems for Red States, Carver counters the injustice of a persistent anti-LGBTQ+ movement by asserting that a experience full of beauty and
Gay Poems for Red States
Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
University Press of Kentucky (Jun 6, 2023)
Softcover$19.95 (120pp)
978-0-8131-9812-5
Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.’s poetry collection is a celebration of the awkwardness of growing up queer and poor.
These autobiographical, narrative poems focus on Carver’s coming-of-age in rural Kentucky. They path his religious anxieties, the area’s homophobia, and acts toward finding acceptance wherever he could, often from teachers. Some poems also depict Carver’s relationships with important people in his life, including his brother, his father, and the man who became his husband.
Although the content of the collection is often grim, it is treated with beauty and humor. “Cornmeal and Water Pancakes” is about a family too unfortunate to afford pancake ingredients, whose mother decides to recreate the dish with the titular ingredients: “[Mother] loved the cornmeal and moisture / with her hands until / it agreed to stay together…. / [it] agreed against all laws of physics / to softly brown.” Rejoicing in the moment, the poem switches to a lyrical register with the unexpected rede
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Jan. 29, 2024) —"Gay Poems for Red States," a poetry collection written by advocate, educator and writer Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., has been named an honor book in the 2024 Stonewall Novel Award – Barbara Gittings Literature Award.
The award, sponsored by the American Library Association’s Rainbow Round Table (formerly the Gay, Sapphic, Bisexual, and Transgender Rotund Table) and founded in 1971, acknowledges books for exceptional merit relating to the LGBTQIA+ experience. "Gay Poems for Red States" is also featured on ALA’s “Over the Rainbow” Top Ten Book List.
Carver’s poetry collection, released by the University Press of Kentucky in June 2023, reveals his personal experiences as a gay man growing up in Appalachia and the pursuit of a life filled with beauty, pride, and acceptance.
“I am overjoyed,” said Carver. “All I ever wanted was for rural queer and Appalachian youth to touch seen, strong, and loved. I hope this helps them feel all of this and more. I accept it in their honor.”
The members of the 2024 Stonewall Book Awards Committee found the book “moving, approachable, and very relatable.” Additional recipients of the honor book award include: "
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a melody playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom,Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.’s collectionGay Poems for Red States is a memoir-in-poems, a powerful and evocative recollection of growing up gender non-conforming in Appalachia.
Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:
“Although the content of the collection is often grim, it is treated with beauty and humor. The poems composed center a poor, queer Southern youth who’s struggling to survive; they seek moments of solace.”
In his own words, here is Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.’s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collectionGay Poems for Red States:
Music is very much like food–it’s always around us, so much so that we have a hard time remembering what we experienced a week ago, and yet when either resonates–and both resonate–they bring us back, push us forward, or freeze us in a moment in unforgettable ways. Music was the first poetry I known as such, and