Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. What does it mean to be American, Californian, queer, even creative, in an era of tweeted populism and hashtags? Miah Jeffra examines our new and rapidly changing public life by questioning a few fundamentals—perception, memory, identity, violence, love—in all their complexity, and in their relationship to one other. THE FIRST CHURCH OF WHAT'S HAPPENING is a love letter to humanity and its resilience, even as it wades through divisive politics, social media and technological disassociation. "Miah Jeffra does not use his imagination to protect himself or to protect us. Instead, he gives us stories of reckless tenderness and anger and sorrow and lust—that overflow with images of wonder and desire. How wonderful!"—Robert Glück "Miah Jeffra writes somewhere between a scream and a growl, in short energetic essays that queer the language in exciting ways. In a letter to the late Keith Haring, Jeffra writes 'I want to feel like a bandit, a punk, a renegade.' And indeed he takes us on an outlaw's journey, provocateur and picador; flaunt and flirt. Here is a writer who grabs the reader by the balls in all the ways one hopes to be testicularly taken."—D.A. Powell "Through these dexterously choreographed essays, Miah Jeffra perfects a grim exuberance that comes to suggest a new optimism. He writes: 'We made the Titanic, we made the Hindenburg, we made the Challenger Shuttle. We made Fukushima. We make love.' Certainly, the blood kinship of love and disaster-each here driven by human ambition for more self-animates this passage. But what deepens it is the breadth of Jeffra's 'we.' There is generosity here despite our capacities for self- righteousness, predation, and social inequity. I leave THE FIRST CHURCH OF WHAT'S HAPPENING believing that what Jeffra evangelizes is resilience as a necessity, not a virtue."—Douglas Kearney "A gem of an essay collection, shot through with humor, anger, and a deep, deep love—for men, for humanity, for language. In lush, risk-taking prose, Jeffra explores what it means to be queer, alive, and struggling in high-tech, low-empathy America. He takes the pulse of the now and quickens it with this sparkling debut."—Janet Sarbanes "Both tough and tender, sometimes laugh-out- loud funny and other times direly serious, Miah Jeffra flips the script in these essays on art, danger, seduction and sexuality. Moving between critical, narrative, lyrical modes Jeffra illuminates and entertains. I loved this book."—Kazim Ali "Vision is a tricky enterprise. So writes Miah Jeffra in his sparkling new collection. In these lyrical essays Jeffra's quick eye catches what we often glide by, slide by, forget to notice, ignore. In these true to life, truer than life stories he shifts our focus from the obvious, the flash, the fa‡ade, to the subtle, background, underground, under skin tales where truer, deeper meaning resides. Luminous moments that often get less fanfare shine forth, rendered by a narrator who doesn't always shout look at me, me, me, but instead look at us, us, us. All of us; the fragile, the fallible, the lovely, the strange. This book not only expands our visual field but our intellectual, emotional and imaginative fields as well. Go see."—Toni Mirosevich

The First Church of What's Happening

Literature & Fiction

Jeffra, Miah

Essays & Correspondence

Nomadic

A low-income Baltimore neighborhood is targeted for a controversial urban renewal project--an amusement park in the theme of Baltimore itself--that forces its residents to reckon with racism, displacement, and their futures. Peter Cryer is a queer teenager who fantasizes about leaving Baltimore and the instability of his home life while also seeking a place to belong. Ruth Anne, his prickly mother, is terrorized by her estranged husband and the indecision of what to do after the wrecking ball comes through her neighborhood. Thomas, a cleric and History teacher at Peter's school, questions his vocation in the face of the neighborhood's destruction. These three voices braid together a portrait of a neighborhood in flux, the role of community and violence in our time, and the struggles of a very real and oft misunderstood city. "A moving triptych of a city in metamorphosis, and the three lives that are altered--hauntingly, tenderly, violently--by these changes. American Gospel is the story of Baltimore, and of how the places we call home are both our sorrow and our salvation."--Shobha Rao "With three rich characters as his threads, Miah Jeffra weaves a flawless tapestry of a community about to be obliterated, capturing the lives of three people who are caught up in the sweep of change. They are a desperate mother, a bitter son, a doubtful priest, and the portraits Jeffra draws are wonderfully composed. His writing is sharp and powerful. His vision of the world is exact. Here is a novel worthy of everyone's notice. A treasure."--Jim Grimsely "Everyone in Miah Jeffra's moving and lyrical novel American Gospel is undergoing a radical transformation--a single mother regaining her agency, a young priest discovering his true advocacy, a high school senior coming into his age--without any guarantees for the future: the very Baltimore neighborhood that gives them common ground is scheduled for demolition and oblivion. Yet somehow grief and yearning are harnessed for power and light, for hope, and Jeffra's novel becomes nothing less than a survival guide for this terrible troubling American moment."--Peter Gadol "Equal parts tender and fierce, Miah Jeffra's American Gospel is an uncompromising portrait of Baltimore and the people who call it home--a portrait framed by three finely wrought characters whose voices converge into a vibrant polyphony that reminds us of the inherent beauty in our brokenness."--Zak Salih "American Gospel is a stunningly rich and complex experience of Place. Behind the urban development plan of Baltimore's Highlandtown neighborhood, the novel vividly immerses readers into the everyday lives of its affected residents. For each character, Jeffra's dazzling prose evokes a longing for connection, peace, and belonging, culminating in a deep meditation on the meaning of home."--Junse Kim Fiction. LGBTQ+ Studies.

American Gospel

Literary

Black Lawrence Press

Violence Almanac

Black Lawrence Press, Inc.

Fiction. In THE VIOLENCE ALMANAC, Miah Jeffra complicates the boundaries between culture and nature, fiction and true-crime, desire and pain. In this powerful fiction debut, Jeffra takes us through the California landscape to map the various ways that violence emerges, terrorizes and shapes our most familiar social structures. An ostracized child yearns to be the hero for a rural community threatened by an escaped penitentiary inmate. An ambitious young writer receives mysterious film clips that thrust her and her boyfriend into a spiral of grief. A sex worker attempts to move on after her best friend is murdered by a john. A seismologist struggles to control his rage over a breakup that summons his internal racism. A biographer seeks to capture the truth of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children. Familiar and real, ripped from headlines yet a fiction all its own, THE VIOLENCE ALMANAC vacillates between visceral horror and heartbreaking humanity. With a broad array of voices, these stories paint a portrait of the vastly diverse, complicated, hyper-mediated state of California and the state of ourselves, and blurs the line between safety and danger, love and obsession, victim and agent of violence.

The Violence Almanac

"A river's edge, if approached too close, can sweep a body beyond itself." In The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic , Miah Jeffra perfects apostrophe as canticle, a host of heroes beckoning the reader a knee deeper into the waters of another selfhood, Madonna, Mary Shelley, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Plato, and Jeffra's mother among them. At once gossamer and gauze, Jeffra explores the nature of gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and love, taking a tiny hammer to the stability of the limits of perception, troubling the tether between perception and memory. At once memoir and cultural criticism, The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic discovers itself as a book about forgiveness, family, and the truths we find in "the lightness of a door," "the probability of a radio," the long line between one story and another.

The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic!: Essays

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Sibling Rivalry Press, LLC

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