Sympathy for Wild Girls

Winner of the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction A debut collection of surreal, skin-piercing stories about the boundless longing of queer Black women. A runaway seeks shelter from violence with a pack of wild coyotes. A young woman falls into a hypocritical crew of white Christian YouTube influencers. A mother witnesses her daughter’s prophecy about the end of the world come true. In Sympathy for Wild Girls, young Black women yearn for intimacy and hunt for belonging in a subtly warped version of our world, where social mores loom like shadows and bigotry shape-shifts. Skirting the chasms that lurk in our common notions of “girlhood”—and their heightened peril for queer women of color—Demree McGhee’s characters track the prints of their desire and pain to the edges of reality, finding refuge in unlikely places. Fighting self-loathing and societal abuse, they explore the bounds of their feral strength and ugliest truths, howling at the moon to be known.