Middle-America's most engaging authors since 1998.
Middle-America's most engaging authors since 1998.
Wayne Courtois was born in Maine and currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri with his husband of 34 years, Ralph Seligman. Wayne writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He holds an MFA from the Writing Program at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, where he studied with Fred Chappell, and was awarded fellowships at the Cummington Community of the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In Kansas City he served two terms as a board member of The Writers Place, and still serves on its Program Committee.
Short stories have appeared in: The Greensboro Review, suspect thoughts: a journal of subversive writing, Velvet Mafia, Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Journal, Best Gay Erotica 2005, Jonathan. Novels: My Name Is Rand (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2004), Tales My Body Told Me (Lethe Press, 2010), In the Time of Solution 9 (Lethe Press, 2013). Memoir: A Report from Winter (Lethe Press, 2009). Poetry Journals: Chelsea Station Magazine, Assaracus, I-70 Review. Poetry Anthologies: Hibernation: Poems by Bear Bards, Gimme Your Lunch Money, The Shining Years. Essays: I Do/I Don’t: Queers on Marriage; Walking Higher: Gay Men Write about the Deaths of Their Mothers; The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered.
Published: 2023
In The old Ambassador and Other Poems, Wayne Courtois gives the reader a sense of the queer experience in America from the onset of the HIV epidemic to current times. This collection displays a mastery of making the personal universal. So often these poems could slip into sentimentality, rants, and political diatribe, but instead Courtois keeps the reader in the poem and, by default, in the poetic moment. His lexicon is often surprising, and his measured use of poetics is sly - opting for slant and internal rhyme instead of predictable hard end rhymes. Whether one flies a rainbow flag or wants to understand better those who do, this collection fills the reader with all of the splendor of being human in a world where one's inclinations towards love can still be opposed, violently, by the dimmest misinformed minds.
~ Shawn Pavey, Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse