Jackson Howard Is Tweaking The Canon

The auteur editor behind your favorite freaky, brilliant books.

Jackson’s Howard’s books are basically required reading for the young (and queer). Since acquiring his first book Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando A. Flores at FSG in 2018, Howard has become something of an auteur editor. Whether it be Brontez Purnell’s revelatory 100 Boyfriends, the triumphant rerelease of Imogen Binnie’s slept-on trans road novel Nevada, or the surprisingly tender tale of a gay mountain lion in Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, a Jackson Howard book harnesses the electricity of being alive.

Guided by a taste in uncompromising, voice-driven books, Howard—through publishing a broad range of fiction and nonfiction—is doing what the best editors have: shaping the modern canon. It’s a canon composed of readers who are not only uncompromising, but really fun to read. And in doing so, he’s helped usher in an era of queer works that aren’t a flash in the pan, but a representation of the full, prismatic breadth of stories to be told.

Ahead, Howard talks to Language Arts about how writing for Pitchfork made him a better editor, MFA discourse, queer books’ so-called “mainstream moment,” how nightlife led him to finding a new audience in New York legends like Telfar and Papi Juice, and more.