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Graywolf Press
Title

Spring 2026 Catalog

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Triage

Triage

by Claudia Rankine

Publication date August 4, 2026 nonfiction

A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just Us

Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.
 
Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.

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Earth 7

Earth 7

by Deb Olin Unferth

Publication date June 9, 2026 fiction

An end-of-the-world love story, an epic full of pathos and humor, asking what can be saved of our planet

Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.

Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do? 

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Range

Range

by Dorthe Nors; Translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight

Publication date August 18, 2026 fiction

In this mesmerizing novel, an astrophysicist searches for her place among her neighbors and in the universe

Gunn Haven, professor of astrophysics, has taken a leave from the institute where she teaches and moved to a rural area. She’s here for the clear night sky and for solitude as she tracks gamma-ray bursts and researches the origins of the universe.
 
But while Gunn studies celestial bodies, she is also contending with earthly bodies. There are her nearest neighbors: Brit, who knows everyone’s business, and Jenny, Brit’s restless teenage daughter. There is her young protégé; Gunn has sent him away to find his own path, yet longs to have him close. There are remote colleagues and dead loved ones, often in her thoughts. And there is the menacing Gable Woman, who, after catching Gunn wandering onto private property, is intent on putting her in her place.

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Attention-Seeking Behavior

Attention-Seeking Behavior

by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo

Publication date May 19, 2026 fiction

A confession from a liar that exposes the interrelation of language, control, performance, intimacy, and love
 

I have never told anyone about this before. There is no way to prove that it happened, but why would I lie?
 
The narrator of Attention-Seeking Behavior wants to tell you about Normal Ben, the man she’s been seeing: their running jokes, the stories she’s told him. She wants to tell you about the incorrect belief that tiny facial expressions betray a person’s real feelings. She wants to tell you about the time she went to a therapist to try to cure her lying habit. She wants to tell you about the body she found on a walk through the park. She wants to tell you about lies she’s told her demeaning, erratic boss. She wants to tell you about the history of police interrogation techniques, which use deception to extract false confessions. She wants to tell you that all lie-detection methods are phony. She wants to tell you what it’s like to read opposing testimonies in a sexual assault case. She wants to tell you about her ex-boyfriend, who is a liar. But is she telling you the truth—or does she only want your attention?

 
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This Poor Book

This Poor Book

by Fanny Howe

Publication date May 5, 2026 poetry

Celebrated poet Fanny Howe’s final book, a kaleidoscopic recasting of her twenty-first-century poems
 
“Granny, why don’t we leave?”
 
Look down onto the street
at the children
with their heads shaved
and their skin too white.
 
Do you want to leave
this house and join the war,
my dark-eyed child?
 
“No, grandmother.”
 
Let’s pull down the shade then.
Open this poor book and read.
 
—from This Poor Book
 
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Whyteface

Whyteface

by A. Igoni Barrett

Publication date August 4, 2026 fiction

A pointed satire about a Nigerian on vacation in Europe, into the heart of whiteness
 

Four years ago, a young man named Furo Wariboko woke up one morning in Lagos to find that he had transformed into a white man. Except for his ass. Now well established with a good job, going by Frank Whyte and living in a nicely appointed house in the capital city of Abuja, he is ready to set off on a real vacation—his first trip outside Nigeria.
 
As Frank travels to Amsterdam, Oslo, and Milan, he finds himself, for the first time in years . . . blending in. His skin is not in the least remarkable. In Amsterdam he befriends his well-meaning but occasionally misguided Airbnb host. There he also meets a Nigerian expat living in America whom he is both delighted to see but who vexes him for reasons he can’t initially identify. In Oslo, he intervenes when a charismatic Kenyan writer is the victim of a racist taxi driver. In Milan he comes upon a woman who might be a distant relative who has survived a treacherous journey of migration. He quickly realizes that he feels most Nigerian when he is outside of Nigeria, and he begins to wonder what it might take to be treated, simply, as human.
 

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Without Terminus

Without Terminus

by Chaun Webster

Publication date June 2, 2026 nonfiction

A dazzlingly inventive account of kinship and dispossession by a two-time Minnesota Book Award–winning author

In his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance, and grapples with the question of how to know—and mourn—the kin he was never able to meet.

webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the relationship between comportment and confinement, speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, his fraught relationship with his mother, and moments with his own child. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors’ lives to those of several historical Black figures—Harriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry “Box” Brown, and Henry Dumas, a writer who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway.
 

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Outcast

Outcast

by Oliver Basciano

Publication date July 7, 2026 nonfiction

The story of how one misunderstood disease became the global blueprint for stigma and ostracization
 

Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World reveals leprosy as the world’s foundational stigma, underlying the colonialism, exclusion, and exploitation that has shaped contemporary life.        
 
After hearing leprosy being used as an anti-immigration dog whistle, Oliver Basciano began a journey into the past, uncovering how this ancient disease has been weaponized, used to justify forced exile and social ostracism around the world. Traveling from the last leprosarium in Europe to remote villages in Mozambique, from Siberian settlements to Brazil’s hinterlands, Basciano builds a history that centers the voices of patients and those forced into the colony system. Along the way, he finds communities formed in exile, patient activism, and the persistent human capacity for joy.

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Party Line

Party Line

by Kyle Carrero Lopez

Publication date July 7, 2026 poetry

A debut collection that examines US-Cuba tensions, transnational Black identity, and revolutionary gatherings
 
I’m at a party I didn’t pay to attend since I’m on the list.
The gays throwing it craft lengthy manifestos on community
care and the impermissibility of all “-isms” within the space
and charge forty dollars at the door. You, too, can cruise
utopia nightly for the price of one disposable income. The money 
you have and the people you know: two ropes. A climb to safety,

or a bind ’round the neck.
—From “Public Policy”
 
Kyle Carrero Lopez’s electrifying debut collection centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the United States and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries—and people—wield power over those they have othered.
 
The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are apolitical or purely escapist, revealing unexpected connections between individuals’ actions and those of the state. His work expands bridges between US and Cuban art by developing an urgent poetics around the material conditions of the US embargo and challenging whitewashed images of Cuban Americans in the US imagination.
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A Catalog of Future Mercies

A Catalog of Future Mercies

by Serena Chopra

Publication date June 23, 2026 poetry

In ghost stories and family history, this lyrical memoir explores mercy as resistance to generational violence
 
The grasses stilled in their ghosts. I cut the roots. Father cautions me
against discarding them in our flower beds—invasive species
are insistent. In vases, the prairie smells of drowned air, calcifies
the glass, rots overnight, and insists we scry the effluvium
for our morning prayer. Withered stamen, balding ovaries—how
do her petals withstand fists of storm and wind? I remove the death
and change the water, unable to discern her kind of thirsting.
—From “Invasive Species”
 
In this luminous memoir-in-poems, Serena Chopra explores the complexities of mercy in an immigrant family haunted by generational violence. Drawing connections between the brutalized prairie beneath suburban lawns and the brutalized body seeking reclamation through sensuality, Chopra examines what it means to be a survivor descended from both survivors and perpetrators. Through divinatory poetics and cross-temporal storytelling, she parallels national histories of violence with the paradox of caretaking for a parent who has been both victim and abuser. And, in the specters of generational violence, Chopra invokes an imperative to stay present with lineages of trauma rather than slip into personal and cultural amnesia. A lyric woven in four parts, A Catalog of Future Mercies reimagines mercy as radical embodied witnessing, a form of resilience that refuses the tyranny of forgetting.
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