"Poet. Cultural worker. Storyteller."

In Moments as They Are, Triston Dabney builds a living archive of Black memory and becoming, where tenderness survives alongside grief, and queerness blooms inside faith. Moving through Childhood, Adolescence, Adulthood, and Benediction, these poems witness the quiet rituals that shape us: the smell of hair grease on wash days, the hymns leaking out of church windows, the kitchen tables where we learn to pray, forgive, and love ourselves again.

 

Rooted in the cadences of oral tradition, Dabney writes with reverence and clarity, drawing on Black familial inheritance while remaking masculinity and celebrating queer joy. Across these pages, ordinary life becomes ceremony: a place where the divine is hidden in the smallest gestures, and where to live is to bless.

 

For readers of Lucille Clifton, Jericho Brown, and Danez Smith, Moments as They Are is both testimony and offering — a debut that asks us to stay, to listen, and to hold each other close.

Triston Dabney is a poet and essayist interested in tenderness as a way of living and thinking. His work explores Black and queer life, memory, faith, and responsibility, often focusing on the small gestures through which care is practiced and inherited. He writes toward endurance rather than urgency, and toward love as an ethical act.

 

His debut collection, Moments as They Are (Fernwood Press, 2026), traces a journey through boyhood, memory, spirituality, and survival with lyrical precision and radical tenderness.