Alum Authors 2026

2026 shortlist for a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry and a Golden Crown Literary Award

Samantha Pious's translations from the Portuguese of Judith Teixeira's poetry in Cactus Flowers resound with sensual energy and burning tenderness. Reading these poems, one is struck not only with the passion of Teixeira's queer love poems but by the way in which turbulent politics and social tensions are subtly traceable within the lines. Translations such as this renew literature across multiple languages; Pious is asking us not only to reconsider Teixeira's place within the canon but to reconsider what makes the canon itself: whose stories are valid, which loves are counted, whose language is considered inventive or new. Pious translates Teixeira's synesthetic rapture for English language readers who might be out of practice with such unconstrained earnestness, reminding us that pleasure does have the possibility of obliterating the pain it passes through. What excites me perhaps most about this collection, however, is its ability to transgress any notion of a quiet reading experience. The lone reader is thrown into the bodily world, reminding us that words first and foremost are of the body and its unique experiences.

-Allison Grimaldi Donahue

Judith Teixeira's poetry has almost always, over the decades, discomfited specialists, whether because she was a woman writer whose style (Symbolist-Decadent, saudosista, and modernist) was used by the masculine canon of her day, or because her own amorous discourse manifests, at times, a lesbian desire characteristic of the poetic of the boudoir. Her verses disquiet, fascinate, and give rise to heated discussions, as often in her defense as in the condemnation of her work. Above all, she translated the clashes of the Roaring Twenties and fought for the right to liberty and artistic expression.

This English edition-with a selection and preface by Samantha Pious, wherein I would underline the sensitivity and care of her fine translations, as well as her personal commitment-allows Anglophone readers to connect with the first Portuguese woman writer to sing of lesbian love, transforming women's bodies into objects of worship and of carnal consummation.

We celebrate this edition, then, with the words Judith Teixeira wrote in 1922 in her poem "Free," which return to life, reinvented, in 2025: "today, my desire intensifies / for what other hours might bring."

-Fabio Mario da Silva

Much of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, we know from recorded rumor--gossip often qualified by the curious phrase "it was said," or the love songs, ballads, and romances that gossip inspired. While we can mine these stories for evidence about the historical Eleanor, Karen Sullivan invites us to consider, instead, what even the most fantastical of these tales reveals about this queen and life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. She reads the Middle Ages, not to impose our current conceptual categories on its culture, but to expose the conceptual categories medieval women used to make sense of their lives. Along the way, Sullivan paints a fresh portrait of this singular medieval queen and the women who shared her world.

This book establishes the profound significance of MGM's 1940 film The Mortal Storm, the first major Hollywood production to depict the plight of Jews in Germany before the Holocaust.

Based on Phyllis Bottome's best seller, also titled The Mortal Storm, the film was made amidst the bitter debate that occurred between 1938 and 1941 over whether the United States should involve itself in another European war or remain an isolationist country, as Charles Lindbergh among others urged.

In 1941, the film triggered the first hostile Congressional investigation of Hollywood where the studios were accused of allegedly propagandizing for war. Lindbergh had secretly urged the Hollywood hearings, inspired by his own growing antisemitism, as his unpublished diary reveals. Hollywood studios, in turn, regarded the growing European crisis with ambivalence. They feared being accused in a film like The Mortal Storm of using the movies to represent the fate of Europe's imperiled Jews. Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, insisted the word "Jew" be removed from the film and "non-Aryan" be used instead, hoping to confuse American audiences about the film's real intent.

Jimmy Stewart, who starred in the film, took it on the road to urge American aid to Britain, while Lindbergh prepared his own campaign to denounce American Jews for luring the country into war. The book reveals how closely Hollywood and politics were entwined on the eve of war. It also reveals how closely the plight of Europe's Jews and American antisemitism were entwined at the same time.

Poetry collection by Beth Brown Preston. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Adanna, African American Review, Atticus Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, The Black Scholar, Callaloo, Calyx, Cave Wall, Euphony Journal, Evening Street Review, Free State Review, Hanging Loose, Helix, Illuminations, Muse, Obsidian, Oyster River Pages, Passenger, Pennsylvania Review, Pensive, Potomac Review, Rain Taxi, Seneca Review, Sinister Wisdom, Storm Cellar, Talking River Review, That Literary Review, Vox Populi and numerous other literary and scholarly journals.