Theory Out the Trunk: Volume I

Theory Out the Trunk, Volume I is a collaborative zine and workshop text by Omaria Sanchez Pratt and Amanda Bennett, Ph.D. It is also the foundation of a Black queer Southern literary ecosystem built around a simple belief: writers should not have to abandon their people, bodies, or ways of knowing in order to live a serious literary life.

Part poetry collection, part craft essay, and part Black queer Southern theory, this first volume offers an alternative model for creative writing, critical thinking, and community gathering. Written in bed, in cars, in gardens, beside graves, and inside the soft architecture of Black queer love, the zine asks what becomes possible when we stop waiting for institutions to validate our work and begin making our own rooms.

Inside you’ll find poems, essays, and a writing prompt rooted in pleasure, grief, memory, softness, self-exploration, and the belief that being held is a precursor to creation.

The ideas in this zine also shape our community programs. Through Backyard Writing Revival, writers gather in an affirming workshop space to develop their craft and build sustainable relationships with their creative practices. Through the Sweetshrub Reading Series, emerging Black Southern writers are paid to share their work in a warm public gathering that also welcomes community members to the microphone.

Together, these projects create a pathway from private exploration to communal practice to public celebration. A writer can enter through a workshop, encounter a community, share their work, and eventually see that work published and circulated without waiting for permission from an institution.

This is theory made portable. Theory from the body. Theory from the porch, the trunk, the kitchen table, the backyard, the altar, the garden, and the page.

For Black writers, queer and trans Southern folks, teachers, artists, organizers, and anyone trying to write their way toward a life that feels more honest, more embodied, and more free.

Digital PDF.