10 Queer Poets to Read, From Sappho to Now

Sappho was a prolific poet from Ancient Greece, specifically the island of Lesbos. She’s considered one of the best lyric poets out there, but most of her poetry has only survived in fragments. Plato famously called her the “tenth muse”. Anne Carsons’s translation of Sappho’s complete works is one of the best, not only outlining where fragments are missing, but juxtaposing the English translation next to the original Greek. She wrote love poetry, specifically queer love poetry about other women, including her famous “Ode to Aphrodite”. You might recognize her name as the inspiration for the word sapphic, and reading her collection would be an introduction to some of the first queer love poetry!

Gaius Valerius Catullus was a poet from the late Roman Republic known for his quite raunchy poetry about both men and women. His most famous male muse was a boy named Juventius, addressed across several poems, while his most famous female muse was a woman he called Lesbia. His poems are untitled, generally just listed as Catullus 1 – Catullus 116. Catullus was known to be an admirer of Sappho, and his poem Catullus 51 is an adaptation of Sappho 31. Another great introduction to ancient queer poetry, I Hate and I Love includes some of his best works in a small, pocket-sized book of poetry.

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was an American poet part of the Beat Generation, a literary subculture that explored the post WWII and Cold War eras. He denounced capitalism, and his poem “Howl” led to his publisher being put on trial for obscenity in San Francisco. He was a Jewish Buddhist who was very politically active, and his writing had a strong influence on queer poetry and the LGBTQ+ movement in San Francisco in general. He listed his lifelong partner, Peter Orlovsky, as his spouse in his Who’s Who entry, decades before marriage equality existed. In terms of understanding the history of the LGBTQ+ movement in literature, Howl and Other Poems is an amazing and important read.

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) was an American writer, intersectional feminist, and a Black lesbian socialist who many readers will have already heard of. She was known for her spoken word poetry, and her poetry itself focused heavily on intersectionality and what it meant. She reflected the multicultural self in her text, and even drew upon African mythos in her poetry. In terms of LGBTQ+ writers, she was incredibly important for popularizing our modern day understanding of intersectionality, and her poems absolutely should be explored.

Richard Siken is an American poet whose writing is raw and whose contemporary style, with a lot of enjambment, odd spacing on the page, and chunks of text are rather different. His writing focuses heavily on his experience as a gay man, and many readers might recognize lines from Crush, his first collection, due to its popularity in some internet spaces. Siken has said that Crush was shaped by the death of his then boyfriend in 1990. His poems are like tiny puzzles to spend time on, to really think about, and his imagery can be shocking for how it grabs attention.

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet who arrived in the United States as a two-year-old refugee, after his family fled Vietnam and spent time in a refugee camp in the Philippines. His debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) remains one of the most celebrated queer poetry collections of the past decade—weaving the trauma of war and displacement together with the experience of growing up gay in a homophobic, working-class household. Vuong’s lines are spare but devastating, often circling his complicated relationship with the father who abandoned the family and the three illiterate women who raised him instead. Vuong is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersection of immigrant and queer literature.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is an American poet and nonbinary lesbian whose 2025 collection, The New Economy, was a National Book Award finalist for its unflinching, often wry meditation on the “ungendered vessel” as it ages, grieves, and survives. Calvocoressi’s work consistently returns to small-town America, faith, the body, and queerness with equal parts tenderness and grit. The New Economy is an intimate exploration of what it means to live in a body that refuses easy categorization—exactly the kind of expansive, in-between space pride is meant to hold—and a strong entry into contemporary American poetry.

Jericho Brown is an American poet from Louisiana and his third collection, The Tradition, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for confronting how casually we’ve become accustomed to violence and for its meditations on Black masculinity, religious upbringing, and queer desire. The collection introduced Brown’s own invented poetic form, the duplex, a hybrid of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues that he’s described as “Black and queer and Southern.” The Tradition is both an essential modern entry in the history of queer Black poetry and one of the most decorated poetry collections of the last decade: a great place to start exploring queer poetry.

Rickey Laurentiis is a Black trans poet raised in New Orleans, and her 2015 debut, Boy with Thorn, moves between elegy and desire, using ekphrastic poems built from classical and Dutch Golden Age paintings to interrogate how Black and queer bodies have been depicted and brutalized throughout history, from lynching to Hurricane Katrina. It is gothic and lyrical, holding historical violence and queer pleasure in the same breath without ever resolving the tension between them. In terms of queer poetry from trans writers, this is an amazing collection to explore.

Yaffa As is a queer, trans, autistic, and disabled Palestinian writer currently serving as Executive Director of the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity. Their 2025 debut poetry collection, Sage, writes from the perspective of a queer and trans Palestinian living at the intersection of displacement, disability, and ongoing genocide, insisting that even as transphobia operates as systemic violence, the everyday wounds of interpersonal harm are still felt in the body. Sage doesn’t separate queerness from the rest of Yaffa’s identity and instead treats all of it as inseparable from the fight for liberation. It’s a newer and less widely known collection than some others on this list, but exactly the kind of intersectional queer poetry that pride coverage should be making room for.