Austin Alexis | Lovers and Drag Queens

Wow. You have a winner with Austin Alexis. What a wonderful poet, and what an elegant, simple, lovely book.

—Mary Orovan, former Features Editor of US Camera Magazine, photographer, poet and writer.

...a clear-eyed, queer exploration of urban characters and dilemmas from the perspective of the talented African-American New York Poet, playwright, and fiction writer, Austin Alexis. In free verse and prose poems, Alexis offers an enticing palette of ordinary and outré people who populate New York...a fine chapbook, well worth perusing.

—Small Press Review by Clifton Snider,

Author of The Alchemy of Opposites

(Chiron Review Press, 2000)

Click here to read Sniders's entire review for Small Press Review



LOVERS AND DRAG QUEENS
by Austin Alexis
soft cover/saddle stitched/12 pp.
$6.25 (+ $1.50 S&H)

Austin Alexis's poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a variety of anthologies, journals, magazines and newspapers including Barrow Street, The Journal, The Writer, The Pedestal Magazine and online at Poetz.com. His theatre, dance and film reviews have been published in the The Arts Cure (formerly New York Dance Fax) and have been translated into Japanese. His plays have been performed in New York City, and one was selected for the Samuel French Short Plays Festival. He is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholarship, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Scholarship, as well as residency fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts and Dorset Colony House. He has performed his poetry at The Back Fence, The Glines Theatre, La Mama La Galleria, The New York Public Library, as well as on WBAI and WBAU, among other venues. Austin has taught creative writing at Hunter College’s Continuing Education Program and has taught and tutored at The College of New Rochelle, Empire State College and Long Island University. He has worked on the staff of Queens College Library and the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. Currently, he lives in Manhattan and teaches at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in Brooklyn.

Brain Waves The person you can’t forget who comes to you at 3:00 a.m. who floats over the barriers of many miles, multiple rivers. The serene, eager face you think you just might love flash-appears in your mind or seeps into your head. So a chime via air waves infiltrates silence. You are a city; that person: the suburbs: attached, inseparable, circling, circling your home, your room, your bed at 3:30 a.m., at 4. You can’t, want to, don’t want to escape.

Austin Alexis at Bowery Poetry Club in NYC on New Year's Day 2008
[Video Credit: Roxanne Hoffman, Poets Wear Prada]