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.

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. 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.

HOME IS WHERE YOU QUEER YOUR HEART anthologizes contemporary queer writers and artists creatively thinking through the complex and fluid realities in the U.S. and abroad. Curated during the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic, as the culture shifts into a new normal—and many queer people feel their nation has further precluded them from a place of comfort—poets, essayists, storytellers, and artists remind us that it is at our kitchen tables, in our bedrooms, on our porches that makes us who we are.

“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 deeper into the waters of selfhood, Madonna, Mary Shelley, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Plato, and Jeffra’s mother among them. 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, this collection 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.

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 dissociation.