Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Award for Lesbian Poetry

dayliGht is a dazzling collection of poems from a necessary new voice, at once a clarion call for stories of Black women and a rebuke of broken notions of sexuality and race.

Growing up, Roya Marsh was considered “tomboy passing." With an affinity for baggy clothes, cornrows, and bandanas, she came of age in an era when the wide spectrum of gender and sexuality was rarely acknowledged or discussed. She knew she was “different,” her family knew she was “different,” but anything outside of the heteronorm was either disregarded or disparaged.

In her stunning debut, written in protest to an absence of representation, Marsh recalls her early life and the attendant torments of a butch Black woman coming of age in America. In lush, powerful, and vulnerable verses, dayliGht unpacks traumas to unearth truths, revealing a deep well of resilience, a cutting sense of irony, and an astonishing fresh talent.

ROYA MARSH

Roya Marsh is a Bronx, New York, native and a nationally recognized poet, performer, educator, and activist. She is the author of the poetry collection dayliGht, which was nominated for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. The former Poet in Residence at Urban Word NYC, Marsh’s work has been featured on NBC, BET, and Def Jam’s All Def Digital, and published in Poetry, The Village Voice, Nylon, Huff ington Post, and in the collection The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic.