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.