The Spoon Knife Anthology is NeuroQueer Books’ annual open-call collection to find new talent and to bring together our favorite regular contributors in a celebration of literature that pushes boundaries and defines the interiors of neurodivergent, Queer, and Mad experiences.

In Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber, editors Dani Alexis Ryskamp and Sam Harvey give you a series of examinations of what it means to live in an environment where one feels that existence itself is a series of tests that must be successfully navigated. From the back cover:

The writers (and editors and publishers) of the book you now hold in your hands have this in common: we all diverge in some way(s) from the normative, the expected, the acceptable. We’ve all been pathologized, scrutinized, corrected–often, in horrible ways. As [we] write this, the United States finds itself in a new test chamber, one whose outputs will inevitably affect the rest of the world. Those of us throughout the world who find ourselves already marginalized, like the authors represented here, will suffer first, but we will not suffer alone. We all need the tools of defiance and resistance. In Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber, we explore what happens when the tools of defiance and resistance are applied to a particular purpose or demand. We test the test chamber in which we find ourselves, and in so doing, we find the power to subvert it.

Please join us for our second year celebrating the diversity and craft that goes into neurodivergent, Queer, and Mad literature, and enjoy the second round of Spoon Knife. You will find a number of familiar AutPress authors in its pages, as well as a few names of people who will be delivering books through the press later this year and more than a couple of authors we hope to see manuscripts from.