Ryan Tracy is the author of three books of poetry—Provincetown Purples (2026), Lines in the Shed (2025) and Tender Bottoms (2023)—all published under the aegis of his own imprint, Auntie Press. His poetry and fiction have appeared in PANK (for which he received a nomination for the 2019 Pushcart Prize for fiction), The Sugar House Review, Dazed Santa, Feral, Twin Bird Review, The Hyacinth Review, and Chronogram, among other venues. Ryan’s scholarly essays have appeared in PMLA, Arizona Quarterly, Derrida Today, and Feminist Modernist Studies. His monograph Drag Education: RuPaul, Queer Theory, and the Politics of Teacher is forthcoming from Punctum Books next year. Ryan teaches literature at Marist University. And when he’s not doing those things, he somehow finds time to perform, make art, and write music. You can follow Ryan's work on his website, www.ryantracy.com, or on Instragam (@littlejeanjacques) and X (@RyanTracyWorld).

Poems for Matthew Shepard

by Ryan Tracy, in process

On October 6, 1998, gay University of Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard was beaten, tied to a fence, and left for dead on a snowy autumn night just outside Laramie, Wyoming. In their efforts to avoid getting caught, the two young men who committed this act, Aaron McKinney and Russel Henderson, relied on the help of their girlfriends, Kristin Price and Chasity Paisley, to destroy evidence related to the attack. When Matthew was found by a bike rider, eighteen hours later, he was still alive. Matthew died after spending six days in hospital, not, however, before U.S. media outlets had turned what happened to him into a national reckoning about the pervasiveness of homophobia in American life. During their trials, Aaron and Russel, encouraged by their girlfriends, attempted to use the “gay panic” defense, accusing Matthew of making sexual advances on them in a way that would have justified their acts of violence. While the judge rejected this defense, it nevertheless confirmed what many people believed—that the attack was motivated by homophobic bias. Since then, reporting by Stephen Jimenez and other journalists has cast doubt on official reports of the incident, especially pertaining to the view that homophobia was Aaron and Russel’s underlying motivation. This collection, in part, responds to these counter-narratives. But its larger moral and aesthetic project is to suture wounds and unanswered (perhaps, unanswerable) questions about homophobia and what it means to be gay in the United States of America. To accomplish this, I draw on Allen Ginsberg's prescient poem "Over Laramie," published in Ginsberg's The Fall of America, which won the National Book Award in 1972. Lines from Ginsberg's poem--such as the phrase "rainwash on mountains" in "Kristen Then"--find their way into Poems for Matthew Shepard like fragments of fossils, hardened by time, but holding information that might help us piece together forgotten histories that never stop doing work in the present.