DIY DREAM: Bryan Borland (right) founded Sibling Rivalry Press, a nationally recognized publishing house for queer poetry, in Little Rock in 2010. His husband, SA Borland, joined the team soon after. Credit: Brian Chilson

In poetry, there is something called a volta. Italian for “turn,” a volta is a moment in a poem that marks a sudden change in direction, often revealing the poem’s true meaning to the reader. In Shakespearean sonnets, the volta typically occurs before the final couplet. 

For Arkansas native Bryan Borland, 46, the founder of North Little Rock-based poetry publishing house Sibling Rivalry Press, the volta happened in January 2025, when the Arkansas Choral Director’s Association bowed to political pressure and removed a song with lyrics by trans poet Amir Rabiyah from the All-State Choir audition and performance repertoire, likely due to Rabiyah’s gender identity. 

At the time, Sibling Rivalry Press, started by Borland in 2010 and publishing at a consistent and prolific pace through 2021, had been on indefinite hiatus for four years. But for Borland and Sibling Rivalry, whose stated mission is to champion and platform LGTBQ+ authors and artists from across the country, continued retirement began to feel uneasy. 

Even more so because one of the many books Sibling Rivalry published during the previous decade was Rabiyah’s 2017 collection “Prayers For My 17th Chromosome.” 

“We had published Amir’s first book in 2017,” Borland said. “So I knew Amir. But I wasn’t back in publishing. I’d moved on. I’ve used the term retired sometimes. There was a time that if that would have happened, I would have had a reading and a protest and brought authors here to fight,” Borland said. “Not doing anything felt like a defeat, not true to myself.” 

Borland and his husband, SA Borland, who have run the press together since 2012, were still processing how they wanted to respond and what the future of Sibling Rivalry might look like, when Bryan Borland visited Washington, D.C., bookstore Busboys and Poets a few months later. 

The first thing he saw upon entering the bookstore was a cardboard cutout of Oprah Winfrey and bestselling writer and poet Ocean Voung, who published his debut chapbook “Burning” with Sibling Rivalry in 2010, becoming the press’ inaugural author. Then, he glimpsed a copy of the novel “Martyr” by Kaveh Akbar, another major writer who got his start with Sibling Rivalry.  

“It was this otherworldly thing, it made me very emotional,” Borland said. “I just felt that electricity.” 

Charged with renewed purpose and energy and armed with a $10,000 Catalyze grant from the Windgate Foundation, Borland decided to awaken Sibling Rivalry from its slumber. 

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Beginning in 2010 with the publication of Vuong’s chapbook, Sibling Rivalry has punched far above its weight class in the poetry world, publishing such acclaimed poets as Akbar, Saeed Jones, Joseph Osmundson and Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips, among many other authors both established and emerging. 

“I count myself both lucky and supremely proud to say that my career began in Little Rock, Arkansas, by an even littler publisher called Sibling Rivalry Press,” Vuong wrote in a June 2024 address to a reunion of Sibling Rivalry poets that serves as a forward to Borland’s forthcoming book “Listen, Kid,” out in August via his own press.

Referring to Borland, Vuong writes in praise of “an editor whose vision, generosity, and perennial kindness sees the seed in you long before you realize it,” while placing Sibling Rivalry in a hallowed literary lineage alongside New Directions, City Lights in San Francisco and New York Review Books. 

Bryan Borland Credit: Brian Chilson

Watching Borland at a back table at Vino’s Brew Pub in May, drinking pints of beer and eating slices of pizza with his husband and two of Sibling Rivalry’s newest additions to its roster of poets, it’s easy to see what Vuong means.  

Self-deprecatingly pointing to his graying beard as evidence of the grind of small press publishing, Borland is warm and engaging, apt to soliloquize about the power of poetry in a way to which I am usually allergic, but that coming from Borland is genuinely inspiring. His enthusiasm for his authors — poets Toni Garcia-Butler and JC Andrews in this instance — is impossible to hide, with Borland often interjecting praise for their works into our conversation and taking every possible opportunity to extoll the prizes, accolades and virtues of theirs and other Sibling Rivalry poets’ work.

“The only way I know how to critique a poem is to say, ‘That’s beautiful, that line is beautiful, that line made me feel something,’” Borland said. “I don’t know how to critique. And now I’m so fucking glad I don’t know that, because that’s what makes the difference.” 

Borland views his role as an amplifier rather than a gatekeeper, focusing on platforming as wide a variety of voices as possible. As stated on the press’ website, “we wanted our ages to be diverse, our faces to be diverse, and our accents to be diverse.” 

“That’s one of the reasons why Sibling Rivalry has been successful is we’ve kept that door open for anybody that calls themselves a poet,” Borland said. “It can be from the spoken-word world, it can be from the academic world, it can be from the elderly people that get together Saturday mornings at the library.”

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The reincarnation of Sibling Rivalry is centered on several publishing initiatives, most immediately the quarterly journal Assaracus and the Arkansas Queer Poets Series. 

Originally published from 2011 to 2017, Borland imagines the book-length literary magazine Assaracus as a broad and unapologetic hub for queer poetry publishing.

The revival of Sibling Rivavlry Press also includes the return of its quarterly literary magazine, Assaracus. Credit: Brian Chilson

“I want it to be like walking into a really queer flea market and you walk down an aisle and you find something you like, or there might be something that’s really weird, or there might be something that you absolutely do not like,” Borland said. “You’re gonna get complete diversity of voice, diversity of experience, diversity of the entire LGBTQ spectrum.” 

While Borland usually gives the poets he selects for Assaracus the space and freedom to publish whatever portfolio of their work they choose, he immediately knew the first poem he wanted to publish in the journal’s revival issue: Rabiyah’s “Release,” the lyrics to the song erased from the Arkansas All-State Choir repertoire in early 2025. 

“It was a way to honor Amir that would give me a way to make the wrong that happened to Amir, right, in a way,” Borland said. “I love that now more people than ever would have known about that piece have now read it.” 

In addition to the rebirth of Assaracus and its national roster of poets, Sibling Rivalry is resuming its full-speed-ahead publishing schedule with non-series titles like “Gay Sex” by Charlie Lou Evans and “A Litter of Lists” by Alex Gildzen, both released in June, and its Bridges series, in which a single poet annually curates four books from emerging writers. 

But Sibling Rivalry’s relaunch, both for Assaracus (whose recent and upcoming issues feature Arkansas poets Acie Clark and Kai Coggin, among others) and beyond, is fueled by a focus on amplifying Arkansan voices. 

“The first time around, we did not focus on Arkansas. All our success was outside of Arkansas,” Borland said. “We used Arkansas to get attention because that made us unique, but our authors were from all over. But Arkansas is on fire; Arkansas is doing it.” 

Little Rock poet Toni Garcia-Butler, whose chapbook “DIY Body” is the fourth entry in Sibling Rivalry’s Arkansas Queer Poets Series, sees Arkansas’ conservatism playing a role in why the thriving poetry scene here is often overlooked.  

“We were talking about these places where we’re from, and people would look at these states and look at the politics,” Garcia-Butler said, “and they would never imagine the gold, the depth of what we’re doing, what we’ve built here.” 

JC Andrews’ “Trillion Amber Trumpets,” released in April, and Garcia-Butler’s “DIY Body,” released in June, are Sibling Rivalry’s most recent additions to the Arkansas Queer Poet Series. Credit: Brian Chilson

JC Andrews’ “Trillion Amber Trumpets,” released in April, and Garcia-Butler’s “DIY Body,” released in June, are Sibling Rivalry’s most recent additions to the Arkansas Queer Poet Series, which began in 2018 with the publishing of Randi Romo’s “Othered.” The two chapbooks represent not only the talent on display from Arkansas poets, but the diversity in style and content. 

Andrews’ chapbook is a stunning collection of clear-eyed poems largely drawing on her time growing up in the Ozarks with striking imagery and lines that stop you in your tracks: “the clean algebra /of the sky,” a teenage girl underneath a smokehouse reckoning with her burgeoning sexuality, the “sound / of lying down / in between / two rows / of corn did not / remember me / the same way / in which / I remember / it which is / young / breathing / and deeply / invisible.” 

“Queerness, especially combined with rurality, is a strange thing,” Andrews said. “Existing within those two things coinciding is just strange, and it’s lonely, but it’s also really rich.” 

Many of the poems in “Trillion Amber Trumpets” also appear in the forthcoming collection “Of An Ilk,” which won the prestigious 2026 Yale Younger Poets Prize, given annually to a poet who has yet to publish a full-length book of poetry. 

Garcia-Butler’s debut “DIY Body” is vibrant, conversational and playful, a collection of poems written over the past decade that colorfully document, as Garcia-Butler puts it, “my own kind of awakening and presence in my body.” 

Through their focus on food, music (especially karaoke) and sex, the poems of “DIY Body” are a document of Garcia-Butler proudly proclaiming the essentiality of his Filipino, Black and trans identities. 

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The importance of Sibling Rivalry existing within and highlighting Arkansas is made even more potent by the starkness of the contrast between the abundance of queer joy on the pages of its books and the oppressive political environment in which those books are born. 

Just one day after I left Vino’s feeling deeply energized by the conversation I had with those working through Sibling Rivalry to create a more inclusive Arkansas, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared June to be Fidelity Month, focusing on fidelity to “God, family, community and country” and posting a link to a Daily Wire article on her Facebook page which labeled the declaration “counter-programming” to Pride Month. 

“It reminded me (again) that in a red state, simply being LGBTQ+ is an act of civil disobedience,” Borland wrote to me following the declaration. “I can aspire to transcend politics, but that is not a reality when queer people and other minorities are erased, redistricted, bullied and attacked by those in power.” 

Garcia-Butler described the inability to disentangle art and politics for queer and marginalized people. “I can write a poem about Spam, and it’s going to be political in some way,” he said. “In this era of renewed mass censorship and erasure, to create from your own experience is a political, revolutionary act in and of itself.” 

The power of this revolutionary act of queer visibility as fostered by Sibling Rivalry is a refrain among its authors. Caroline Earleywine, whose excellent chapbook “Lesbian Fashion Struggles” was published by Sibling Rivalry in 2020, said that “This Assignment Is So Gay,” a 2013 Sibling Rivalry anthology of LGBTQ+ poets on the art of teaching, had a profound effect on her far before the press put out her work. 

“I was a closeted teacher at the time feeling isolated and alone, and all of a sudden I had in my hands reflections of my experience,” Earleywine said. “That’s the magic of the press, and why we are so lucky to have them here in Arkansas.” 

For Borland, it is those types of interactions that provide the motivation to keep Sibling Rivalry active. 

Bryan and SA Borland of Sibling Rivalry Press Credit: Brian Chilson

“You can’t squander opportunities to lift other people up,” Borland said. “We all have this opportunity: If something you do gets somebody to their next day, you may never know it. You may never know the impact on somebody, but if you help somebody get to their next day … damn. Not much more than that.” 

And, as Borland points out, inane proclamations like that of Sanders and other bigoted Arkansans only fuels the creation of more and more outstanding art. Much of which, luckily for Arkansas and the wider literary world, Sibling Rivalry plans to publish in the years to come. 

“Anytime you push art down, anytime you push poetry down, anytime you try to silence, or sit, or censor or tell people what they can and can’t say,” Borland said, “that’s when it turns punk, that’s when it rises, that’s when it gets exciting.”