Josiah Morgan
Aotearoa rainbow author feature
Josiah Morgan (Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Maniapoto) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer and writer based in Ōtautahi.
Josiah’s work has been featured in The Spinoff, Landfall, Out Here, eel magazine, Aotearoa Yearbook and Mayhem, among many other international journals, online blogs, and magazines. He regularly writes for Aotearoa-based journals such as ‘Bad Apple’, and was published in the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook in 2022 and 2023.
Josiah holds a Bachelor of Arts with majors in Anthropology and English and a minor in History from the University of Canterbury.
In 2021, Josiah’s book ‘Road: A Postlapsarian Comedy’ (Feral Dove Press) won the Macmillan Brown Writers’ Prize, which recognises exemplary English works by a current student or recent graduate, from the University of Canterbury English department.
Josiah published another full-length book, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, with Amphetamine Sulphate in 2022. It was performed as a six-hour-long performance artwork in Auckland Pride 2024.
His chapbook publications include ‘Inside the Castle’ (2021), ‘Circles’ (2020), ‘Road: A Postlapsarian Comedy’ (2022).
Josiah has also performed full-length adaptations of his works ‘Inside the Castle’ (2021) and ‘Circles’(2020) at the Little Andromeda Theatre in Christchurch. He has also participated in the popular live poetry performance ensemble Show Ponies.
Josiah’s latest work, i’m still growing, was published with Dead Bird Books in 2024.
Instagram: @josiahmorganartist
Website: neutralspaces.co/josiah_morgan_castle/
Q: Ko wai koe?
Josiah: My name is Josiah Morgan. I was born and live in Ōtautahi, though I work all over the country and sometimes even internationally. I whakapapa to Kāi Tahu and Ngāti Maniapoto. Whilst my sexual orientation would stereotypically be defined as gay and my gender as cisgender, I identify more with the words ‘queer’ and ‘takatāpui’ for their flexibility, their lack of binary thinking, their openness to a world that asks us to be open to it. Language is the most important signifier we get to place upon the world and upon ourselves. I like my language to be as open as it possibly can be.
Q: What inspires you as a rainbow author?
Josiah: I’m inspired by all sorts of things. A lot of my work is fuelled by an interest in the poetic technique of ekphrasis. I often write ekphrastic poems after watching films. Cinema as a medium has a deep ability to capture queer longing because of the ease with which metaphors are constructed visually. Some favourite queer films include modern classics like Call Me By Your Name and I even liked Heartstopper, but I also love more left-field queer films like A Nightmare On Elm Street 2 (which is just about the gayest horror movie of all time). I obviously have a soft spot for the queer icon themselves, The Babadook.
Support Josiah’s Work!
I’m Still Growing
Josiah Morgan
It’s been a while since i kitchen-handed imaginary violations onto loved one’s bodies. After publishing his first four books in the United States, i’m still growing brings the poetry of Josiah Morgan (Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Maniapoto) into print in Aotearoa for the first time. I’m still growing is a book of identities that shape-shift among the darkening landscape of mundane, suburban New Zealand. It pairs violence with sexuality, and sexuality with catharsis. This book is a eulogy to dead friends, a eulogy to a dead self, and a promise of what is to come.
Category: NZ Authors, Poetry
Representation: Takatāpui, Gay
Content Warnings: Unknown
Published: Dead Bird Books, Auckland, New Zealand, 2024
ISBN: 9781738618224
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Road: A Postlapsarian Comedy
Josiah Morgan
BARNI WAS HERE.
A strange vagrant wanders a nameless country in search of meaning. He is interrupted along the way.
Winner of the 2021 Macmillan Brown Writers Prize.
Category: NZ Authors, Fantasy. Science Fiction
Representation: Unknown
Content Warnings: Unknown
Published: Feral Dove Books, 2021
ISBN: 9798985676419
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Josiah Morgan
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is ‘a forensic survey embracing the cinematic delirium of Tobe Hooper. It is a “heady and queer collation of confession, ultraviolence and countless paraphilias, radical in every way.”
Category: NZ Authors, Horror
Representation: Unknown
Content Warnings: Unknown
Published: Amphetamine Sulphate, 2022
ISBN: 9781953559067
Josiah’s rainbow book recommendations!
Note to young people: some of these books are ultra-serious/depressing. I read all of these books except Talia when I was a teenager and found them enlightening and validating. Your mileage may vary. To me, queerness and my positioning within rainbow communities has always been two-sided, the light and the dark. These are all books that accomplish both.
Closer
Dennis Cooper
Physically beautiful and strangely passive, George Miles attracts his fellow students with a mysterious promise, like a wallet lying on the street. One after another, his teenage friends rifle through George, ransacking him for love or anything else they could trust in the mindlessness of middle America. What they find is a vision of nightmare intensity, in a novel that assaults the senses as it engages the mind.
Closer follows the links of desire and value that drag George into the arms of men like John, an artist who drains his portraits of humanity in order to find what lies beneath; Alex, fascinated by splatter films and pornography; and Steve, an underground entrepreneur who turns his parents’ garage into a nightclub. These and others pass George from hand to hand, hoping to feel even one emotion clear and uncorrupted by society, but George remains a blurry ghost until he is picked up by two men in their forties. Tom and Philippe think they can find reality in the sharp outlines of bones and the bright red of blood; obsessed with the beauty of death, they find in George the perfect object for their passion.
Category: Adult
Representation: Gay
Content Warnings: Sexual violence, sexual content, violence, mental illness, homophobia, substance use/abuse, gore, abuse, self-harm
Published: Grove Press, 1994
ISBN: 9780802132123
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece — a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire.
Through the story of Charles Ryder’s entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh’s early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.
Category: Adult, Historical Fiction
Representation: Gay
Content Warnings: Substance use/abuse, homophobia, religion, mental illness, racism, antisemitism, suicide, sexual activity
Published: Little Brown, USA, 1945
ISBN: 9780316216456
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Echidna
essa may ranapiri
essa may ranapiri’s second poetry collection follows the story of Echidna, their own interpretation of the Greek Mother of Monsters, as she tries to figure out life and identity living in a colonised world. Alongside this, Māui and Prometheus get into a very hot relationship. Echidna contends with three strands of tradition; Greek mythology, Christianity and Māori esoteric knowledge, and through weaving them together attempts to create a queerer whole. It is a book that is in conversation with the work of many others; from Milton and R.S. Thomas to jayy dodd and Joshua Whitehead to Hinemoana Baker and Keri Hulme. Situating and building its own world out of a community of queer and Māori/Pasifika writing, it carefully places itself in a whakapapa of takatāpui story-telling.
Category: NZ Authors, Poetry, Fantasy
Representation: Takatāpui
Content Warnings: Unknown
Published: Te Herenga Waka University Press, New Zealand, 2022
ISBN: 9781776920099
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Talia
Isla Huia
“all i shoot straight from the hip
is hipbone. an iwi in its own right.
all the world is a river. tequila sunrise, psoriasis, and peace.”
Talia is the debut poetry collection from Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku). It is a critique of hometowns, an analysis of whakapapa, and a reclamation of tongue. It is an ode to the earth she stands on, and to a sister she lost to the skies. It is a manifesto for a future full of aunties and islands and light.
Category: NZ Author, Poetry
Representation: Takatāpui, BIPOC
Content Warnings: Unknown
Published: Dead Bird Books, New Zeland, 2023
ISBN: 9781991150639
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Super Model Minority
Chris Tse
It’s the end of the world and Chris Tse has lost his chill. In Super Model Minority he completes a loose trilogy of books – from the historical racism of How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes to a queer coming of age in HE’S SO MASC – by looking to a future where ‘it’s enough to look up at a sky blushing red and see possibility’.
From making boys cry with the power of poetry to hitting back against microaggressions and sucker punches, these irreverent and tender poems dive headfirst into race and sexuality.
Category: Poetry, NZ Author
Representation: Gay, BIPOC
Content Warnings: Homophobia, racism
Published: Auckland University Press, New Zealand, 2022
ISBN: 9781869409616
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)