Slingshot

2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER

2020 FINALIST for the FIRECRACKER AWARDS

SLINGSHOT questions the value of manhood, the price of sex, and the possibility of liberation.

SLINGSHOT begins with the author ensconced in the menacing isolation of the pastoral, but once the work migrates to the City, monstrum grows form and fangs. In these messy, horny, desperate poems spun from dream logic, Cyr e Jarelle Johnson considers the consequences of black sexual and gender deviance, as well as the emotional burden of being forced to the rim of society, then punished for what keeps you alive.

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a writer and librarian living in New York City. They are a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University. In 2018 their work appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, Rewire News, The Root, Nat. Brut, and WUSSY. They have given speeches, lectures, and spoken on panels at The White House, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The University of Pennsylvania, The Philadelphia Trans Health Conference, Tufts University, and Mother Bethel AME Church, among other venues. Their work has been profiled on PBS Newshour and Mashable. Cyrée Jarelle has received fellowships and grants from Culture/Strike, Leeway Foundation, Astraea Foundation, Rewire News/Disabled Writers, Columbia University, and the Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund. They are a founding member of The Harriet Tubman Collective and The Deaf Poets Society.