Still, We Are Sacred is a searing and luminous collection by poet Emanuel Xavier, weaving memory, resistance, and survival into a radiant tapestry of verse. With unflinching honesty and lyrical power, these poems reclaim queerness, Latinx identity, and the sacredness of lived experience through family hauntings, cultural reckonings, and the healing echoes of chosen kin. From the streets of Bushwick to the sacred piers of memory, Xavier offers readers testimony and triumph, reminding us that even when erased, we remain divine.

Emanuel Xavier is a poet, author, and spoken word artist whose groundbreaking work has helped shape contemporary Latinx and LGBTQ+ literature. His poetry collections include Pier Queen, Americano, If Jesus Were Gay, Love(ly) Child, Radiance, and Nefarious. A former homeless youth and pioneering figure of the Nuyorican and ball scenes, Xavier rose to national prominence with raw, unapologetic poems that have been featured in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, Poetry, A Gathering of the Tribes, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Gay City Impact Award and an International Latino Book Award. Still, We Are Sacred marks a powerful return to the personal and political, offering testimony to survival, memory, and queer resilience.

A Night at the Disco is a celebration of groundbreaking dance music from 1970–’79. An unprecedented collection of photographs of more than 100 artists, illuminating the styles and sounds from a decade that sparked a global phenomenon in music and culture. Exclusive comments from Donna Summer, Barry Gibb, Debbie Harry, Giorgio Moroder, founding members of CHIC, Labelle, The Trammps, Village People, Earth, Wind & Fire, and dozens more artists, songwriters and producers, offering fascinating insights that tell the stories behind the beats. From underground New York clubs to discothèques across the globe, A Night at the Disco illustrates how artists spanning soul, pop, disco, funk, jazz and rock defined nightlife during the 1970s and influenced popular music to the present day.

Christian John Wikane is a NYC-based writer who has interviewed 500+ recording artists. He is a Contributing Editor at PopMatters, Co-producer of Unscripted: Conversations with Christian John Wikane, and Consultant on Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over (CNN), Love to Love You, Donna Summer (HBO), and the Emmy-nominated Tina Turner documentary, TINA (HBO).

Join Christian for this special book signing where he will interview Cassandra Wooten and Cheryl Mason-Dorman of The Ritchie Family, one of several Philadelphia-based groups featured in A Night at the Disco. Produced by Jacques Morali, The Ritchie Family scored three #1 disco hits during the 1970s: “Brazil,” “The Best Disco in Town,” and selections from their classic album African Queens.

It’s a steamy, restless end of the school year in New Orleans. Sister Holiday is staying busy with her music classes and preparing for her permanent vow ceremony, a pivotal moment in her journey of faith. But when one of her favorite students is found dead of a fentanyl overdose, Sister Holiday and her partner-in-PI, Magnolia Riveaux, are launched on a mission to track down the drug dealers. As students continue to fall prey to this sinister drug under her watch, Sister Holiday becomes more and more desperate to stop this epidemic. All the while, she must contend with her own past with addiction, a demon that is never too far.

Sister Holiday’s darkest and most shocking case yet will test the limits of her faith—and her sanity—as she goes deep undercover with a local gang and ultimately uncovers a truth with lethal implications for those she loves. With the series’ signature mix of grit, heart, and faith, Divine Ruin is a stunning and timely addition to a one-of-a-kind series.

Margot Douaihy lives in Northampton, MA, and is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College. She is the author of the award-winning, nationally bestselling Sister Holiday series, in addition to the poetry collections Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, Scranton Lace, and Girls Like You. Her debut mystery, Scorched Grace, won The Pinckley Prize in Crime Fiction and was named a Best Crime Novel of the Year by The New York Times, The Guardian, and others.

Scholarship and performance combine to show how drag can be a blueprint for critique, care, teaching, and worldmaking. 
 
Lessons in Drag brings to life a vibrant and thought-provoking dialogue between scholar Kareem Khubchandani and his drag persona LaWhore Vagistan. Beginning with an intimate interview, the book unfolds in alternating chapters where the two exchange insights, stories, and critiques. Khubchandani delves into the lessons LaWhore’s drag practice offers about academia—shaping his approaches to research, teaching, and writing—while Vagistan reveals how Khubchandani’s scholarship influences her performances, inspiring her understanding of fashion, music, divas, and aunties. Together, their reflections and conversations weave a compelling tapestry of drag’s instructive power. Witty, bold, and deeply personal, Lessons in Drag is both an invitation to explore drag as a practice and a celebration of its transformative potential.

Kareem Khubchandani is associate professor of theater, dance, and performance studies and associate professor of studies in race, colonialism, and diaspora at Tufts University. He is the author of Decolonize Drag and Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife and the coeditor of Queer Nightlife.

A dazzling docupoetic debut collection interweaving personal loss with the life stories of Aaliyah Haughton, Whitney Houston, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Phyllis Hyman, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, and others to explore sexuality, survival, queer mourning, and the afterlives of stardom.

“I made, of my bones, an earth for you: turned the oceans
your favorite shade of light, that deepened, nearly bruised
dusk. Reflected in my palms, what I’ve made into water
glows amethyst”

In m. mick powell’s polyphonic, haunting debut, a chorus of voices conjures up intimate pop herstories to map how the poet’s queer Black girlhood was molded by their memory. With tender reverence, powell meditates on the deaths of her own beloveds while reflecting on the many stages of an icon’s life: How did these women challenge conventional representations of Black femininity and transform the musical landscape? How did they navigate abuse and alienation in the limelight? How do the mythologies that survive them establish afterlives of queer femme possibility?

Through sensual imagery, speculative verse, and splendid wordplay, Dead Girl Cameo takes us beyond the headlines, innovating a Black feminist poetic that traverses the richly textured realms of grief, girlhood, love, widowing, femme friendship, and queer fandom.

m. mick powell (she/they) is a queer Black Cape Verdean femme poet, an artist, an Aries, and the author of the chapbook chronicle the body. Their poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize and have been published in Frontier Poetry, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. An Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, mick’s work situates Black queer femme existence and experience as rupture, revolution, revelation, and revival. She enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love.