Sara Youngblood Gregory is a masterful writer. Her debut poetry collection DEAD BOYS IN SPACE follows a lesbian who lost her younger brother to AIDS before the book begins. It also imagines that the HIV/AIDS crisis was, instead of the immense loss of an entire generation, a space colonization project where those with HIV/AIDS got to live full, happy lives in space.
The collection is speculative, sexy, grief-stricken, angry, and stunning in its approach to craft and science. In this interview, I sat down with Sara to talk sci-fi, craft, her inspirations, and more. Peer into the mind of this unique voice in contemporary poetry.
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KB: So you have a quote in the first poem that I pulled, “The only thing you need to know about him is that he’s not here.” And I see this book and the speculative nature of it as a way to imagine a better future. Why did you choose speculative poetry to talk about themes such as HIV/AIDS, space colonization, and lesbianism?
SYG: That’s a really good question. I didn’t know that what I was doing was speculative poetry at first. I was asking myself a lot of “what if” questions. I felt drawn to thinking about a different, better world, and for me, that meant thinking about and reimagining and revisiting the past. I’d been working on this manuscript for a number of years, and originally, when I had written it, it was much more of a memoir or autobiographical. I kept returning to certain themes. AIDS was one of them — [and] family, sex, sickness — and I just realized that those were the poems that I felt most strongly about, and most of them had some sort of speculative bend to them. Because I didn’t live through the height of the AIDS crisis, I had a lot of questions about it personally — in my own life, in my society, how it affected my own identity as a lesbian, my own coming out, my own family dynamics, my own sexuality. Sickness, too, was a lot in there. Eventually, I recognized that I could heighten my own need for speculation into the genre of speculative poetry.
It just seemed to really make sense to me that the only way that I could think about the grief and the anger, was to reorganize my world, the “real world,” around this generational queer loss, the strangeness and transference of memory that happens between generations, families, and queer people.
When I wrote the middle section — the play/the really sci-fi space where I do a lot of the world-building ––I was like, “Okay, so I know that these themes are here. Now I need to build out this world and what it actually looks like.” I used space colonization and forced exile, themes that I feel are very present in science fiction because they’re very present in our world. And then I went from there. I built out some poems like the opening poem, “The Only Thing You Need to Know About Him Is That He’s Not Here.” I very explicitly imagined the poems fitting into the world that I built in the play.
KB: The time of the AIDS crisis reverberates in a lot of the media that I consumed as a young person, and then also in general it informs what it means to be queer. What got you interested in this subject matter?
SYG: There’s a lot of ways that I can answer this question.
I would guess that we’re probably of similar age. We kind of came “after” the height of the AIDS crisis (though I don’t really think that an “after” exists), which means that I feel I’ve grown up in this shadow, you know? I think society has been very much reorganized around the AIDS crisis in the United States — and I’ll just speak in the context of the United States — and I feel that society and queer, young people have been shaped by AIDS. But this reality isn’t always visible, or talked about. Of course, there are books, there are movies, there’s so much art that we can revisit. But I just had this sense of enormity, of presence, of weight around this history I felt that I had, in my own way, inherited.
I think most queer people have inherited the legacy of the AIDS crisis. And I think a lot of us don’t really know what to do with that. I think it’s scary, and I think it’s really confusing. In some ways it feels very distant, and in other ways it feels extremely present. I was interested in that feeling, and I wanted to remember better, and I wanted to grieve better, and I wanted to put a sharper point on this vague political anger that I felt. And to sharpen that point, I needed to write around it.
So that’s one way that I would answer that question. The other way is that I’ve been really lucky to know older gay people, older lesbians in particular, and the AIDS crisis always comes up. It’s never not come up in a relationship or a friendship that I’ve had, pretty much unprompted. I think most people think about gay men, but I think lesbians, women and of course trans people have been so shaped by this crisis that is still mostly associated with gay men.
KB: Thank you for that answer. And I want to actually, since you’ve already brought it up, talk about the third section of the book. It’s a long piece where a professor presents an imagined, US-funded space colonization project that happened in the ’80s that led to this autonomous community of queer men in space. What research went into this? I know you said “play” earlier. I was thinking of it as a prose poem, but can you talk about it a bit more?
SYG: I think that it is definitely a prose poem. I call it a play; I’ve called it a prose poem. In some ways, I think it’s a short story too. It’s pretty amorphous, which I think is also what makes it fun.
I call it a play because I really want it to be performed. I really like the idea of the professor, who is the narrator of the poem, transforming the audience into his lecture audience. I want everyone listening to be implicated in this professor’s inaccurate version of history and to feel the undercurrents of rebellion from certain elements of the audience.
The play/prose poem started out as a short story. I was interested in making this redacted document of a failed space colonization effort made by the US government during the Space Race. The Space Race melded with the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare and the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s. Initially, I was writing a short story and I was following around this bureaucrat, this kind of pencil-pusher guy who was very patriotic and very much believed in the mission. I re-read Kennedy’s 1961 announcement where he states the country is “committed to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” I was looking into the Soviet space missions. I got really obsessed with Yuri Gagarin, who was the first person to leave earth. He went in a Soviet spacecraft and went into the very, very, very upper atmosphere. So he technically left Earth, but he was not quite what I would call outer space or moon territory.
I also got really interested in the Challenger explosion. I got really interested in news clippings and what people thought about the space race — even the conspiracy theorists who deny that the moon landing happened. There were lots of little bits and pieces of history, but also pop culture, geopolitical tensions, and US imperialism and expansionism and aggression. And I was like, well, it makes sense to enforce that collision with the AIDS crisis because I think so much of obviously American patriotism is intensely homophobic, racist, and all of these other things.
I was really interested in this fear around the homosexual that was going on in the 60s-80s and how it was connected to anti-communism. That combination led me to space in a really interesting way, I think.
KB: It feels like this is documentary poetics, since you intentionally engaged in research in order to realize your poems.
I said “prose poem” earlier because I’ve noticed that there are just a lot of prose poems in this book. There are some books that are all one form — think of Frank: Sonnets and things like that — and this is not necessarily that. But the prose poem feels like something that this book returns to often. Talk about your affinity to the prose poem in this book and how you feel like the prose poem helped you tell these stories.
SYG: It felt important to me that, if the narrative was centering around a sister and a brother, the sister’s voice had enough space on the page, and that she could almost be writing love letters to her brother. The prose I felt very much fit that. I’m thinking of “Song for My Brother.” I’m thinking of “Constellation” in particular [too]. Those felt like very much within the world, very much her voice coming through.
Since I wrote the manuscript over a few years, I had initially written a lot of prose pieces. As I was working on edits and expansions with my editor, and then also just as I was still writing through the manuscript too, I was bringing in sort of different influences. I was reading different books, I was in different phases of my life, I started just doing a lot more verse. That shows up in pieces like “Eulogy” and “Blood Sister, Only Child.” Those poems came later. Also, they’re years apart. I started writing the collection when I was 23; I’m about to be 30. So I was going through different phases in my own work and in my own influences, and that kind of charts through form as well.
KB: Absolutely. I had the flip issue: I tried to write my memoir as a poetry book first, and thankfully, it didn’t go as planned. It’s interesting how those traces of that still show up in your book, and in the book I wrote as well. What is form except the drawing of a line anyway?
Since you’ve brought up this brother and this sister character: I thought it was really interesting that you chose to center the human cost of the crisis in a really personal way. We hear from the perspective of a girl mourning a brother that she never met due to his AIDS-related death. I think that is especially clear in the poem “Eulogy.” An excerpt of it reads:
Thirty years
or more after
your death
my father
mentions you
and each syllable
of your name
is a pearl
spirited
up from some
precious
sinking
grief
This really hit me because I’m actually a child born on the brink of the death of one of my siblings. That sibling died in 1996, and I was born in 1995. So I guess I wonder: what do you feel is unique about that experience? I’d love to know how you came to the choice of putting the book in the point-of-view of a sister who lost a brother that she never knew.
SYG: Thank you for sharing that. I’m interested in the family unit. I think that parents are such a bridge to lineage, memory keeping, the past, and one’s future. It can be a bridge, but it can also be a wall.
In this family, in this sister’s world, family is a wall, and she really wants to break through that wall. She really wants to know about her brother. She really wants to know about this grief, and it feels extremely precious when her brother is brought up and when he’s named. It feels [to her] like a responsibility to know, and also a silencing around asking. We don’t really see the parents’ perspective, and we don’t really see any other of the family’s perspective, one because it’s the sister’s story and her relationship to her brother, but also, two, I think that complexity is part of the urgency in why she feels she needs to have a relationship with the brother.
I think there is a synchronicity of a brother and a sister who are so closely related by blood, family, and circumstance, but there is also a gap between them. I wanted to capture this sense that they’re so closely bound and also at the same time they just missed the opportunity to know each other. The tragedy of that felt more keen when I paired them as a brother and sister, versus another sort of constellation of family members.
It gets at how closely linked the generations are between who survived the AIDS crisis, those who didn’t and those who came directly after. There’s such a small window. And then for people who were born on the “other side” of the crisis, like myself, there’s this renaming and remembering process that has to happen.
I thought that a brother and sister, who were so closely connected and who very much loved one another but did not know one another, just seemed like the appropriate way to talk about this tragedy and this particular family and, more widely, this tragedy between generations. Wouldn’t it be so lovely if we — people our age and younger queer people — had this generation of mentors, and elders, and artists, and teachers, and lovers, and bad influences, and all of those things? And what happens when we try to remember people we didn’t get to know?
KB: This book does a little bit of imagining that those people instead were able to be together in an alternate universe. I thought it was especially nice to see someone thinking about two siblings that just missed each other, and there is a uniqueness about the book being from the POV of the person born in the aftermath of a tragedy.
Thinking about the present day: we’re in the age of research funding for HIV and AIDS prevention and treatment being slashed or at least threatened. You’re also in New York City, if I’m not mistaken where ACT UP in the ’80s and beyond did successful advocacy for HIV and AIDS. I literally just went to a Sarah Schulman reading like two weeks ago, so that’s got me thinking about this, too. Why is this story important to tell today?
SYG: This book comes at a time where there is an active devaluing of LGBTQ people, and of HIV/AIDS funding and resources. When I started writing DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, it was 2018 or 19, which feels like a very different time politically. The writing felt archival; it was an honoring and learning process. It was a legacy-oriented, tribute-oriented, memorial-oriented, personal project. And now that it’s being published in 2026, it’s a different time — just a few years later.
It’s interesting that DEAD BOYS IN SPACE is coinciding with HIV funding cuts. It feels really sort of urgent and poignant in a way that unfortunately it might not have even just a couple of years ago.
I wonder too how much the pandemic has also influenced people’s renewed interest in the AIDS epidemic. There is a list of over 100 works around HIV/AIDS published since 2020, compiled by Theodore (ted) Kerr and Alexandra Juhasz with help from those involved in the HIV/AIDS organizing. Obviously a lot of this work had been pursued prior to the pandemic and the publication dates just so happened to be coinciding with the pandemic. But I also think that there’s probably a relationship between COVID literature and HIV/AIDS literature.
Regardless of the particularly precarious moment that we find ourselves in, it feels very important to tend the fire of the AIDS crisis and how it has shaped the lives of queer people. I would feel as strongly about it, regardless of the political climate. But it does feel particularly important to acknowledge and to think about now.
KB: Yeah, that makes sense to me.
So I love a poem sequence. I love it when I see a poem title reappear multiple times in a book ‘cause then it commands my attention. So I noticed the GRID poems in DEAD BOYS IN SPACE.
When I first encountered them, I thought they were bingo poems (a la Fatima Asghar) but they are instead literal grids — which makes sense since GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) is the original acronym for HIV/AIDS. These poems are also very fragmented. And you don’t have them near each other; instead, they’re interspersed throughout the collection.
So tell me a bit more about the making of these poems, why you chose this form for it, and, why you chose the ordering that you did for when they appear in the book.
SYG: So originally the grid poems all had totally different titles, and they followed a lot more closely a form of one of Franny Choi’s poems from Soft Science called “Glossary of Terms.” Originally, there was an extra column on the left-hand side, and it said word, definition, antonyms, synonyms, things like that. It was really an exercise in exploring theme and voice, and that’s why I think also some of it is fragmented. I knew there was something about the form that I really found provocative because it was so contained.
And a year or two later, at the point where I decided the collection was going to really center around HIV/AIDS, I saw that the original name of HIV/AIDS was Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, or GRID. It was emotional. It also was kind of an insulting name. I said “Oh my God, here I am writing around containment in these little fragmented boxes, and writing around exile on the page, [now] the grid to me looks like a cage.” So I was thinking about cages and stacked funeral plaques.
I was thinking about all of these images that the grid format really brought to my mind. These images of exile, really. Of containment. Of separation. It felt bad to read that diagnosis, that terminology “GRID”. But also I felt I was very much onto something, so I immediately renamed these poems, all of them. I rewrote some of them. Then I sort of lingered in that anger and pessimism around the form.
It felt bad. There’s no other word. It just felt bad that I was writing these little boxes and cages, and then it was like the whole origin of the condition was called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. That influenced different pieces, and it influenced the middle play. There was a lot that happened, emotionally and in the form, once I had read that name. It was a lightning moment.
Eventually, I recast what I saw as this generation’s exile, and I really reoriented how I was viewing the grids. I thought about escape rather than exile. I thought about the sly ways that queer people find spaces for themselves — families for themselves, communities for themselves — from very difficult situations. And I started thinking about the AIDS quilt. Towards the end of the collection, I decided to change how I saw the grid — and in fact how the speaker sees the grid and her brother’s exile — and recast the squares not as cages, but as quilt squares. Something more liberatory and comforting. An expression of art, of making beauty and memory from tragedy.
I hope that that movement came across.
KB: It did, and I appreciate that. I was like, oh, genius — this name with this form. As I tell my students, this is when the form matches the content!
So you brought up Soft Science as inspiration. You also have a very robust notes section of different books that went into the poems. I’d love to know your comps. What poetry collections, sci-fi books, and otherwise had to exist in order for this book to exist? And what are you reading now?
SYG: It’s interesting; during the writing process, I mostly just read to my taste. I read a lot of just different poetry collections that I wouldn’t really call speculative but were definitely influential.
But also novels too. I read a lot of historical fiction. I read sci-fi fantasy. Unfortunately, Dune probably influenced me.
Natalie Diaz. Sam Sax. The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. That was lovely. These are all books and writers that I was reading around the time of deep writing. I have a whole HIV/AIDS-related bookshelf section. Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS — really beautiful. Mark Bibbins’ 13th Balloon, which I also mention in the notes as well.
I haven’t read this yet, but I just got it in the mail: Steven Corbin’s A Hundred Days From Now, which I’m really looking forward to. I think it’s also fairly speculative in nature. Sister & Brother: Lesbians & Gay Men Write About their Lives Together is also an anthology that I’ve been reading and really enjoying. It surprised me in a lot of ways. A lot of the anthology reflects on the relationships between gay men and lesbians in the ’50s and ’60s. And so there’s a lot of sexual relationships happening between people who for sure know that they are gay. Wild. Blood Loss by Keiko Lane was a really, really interesting memoir. Keiko Lane was a Queer Nation and ACT UP activist in LA in the ’90s, and she was 16 when she joined these organizations, so a lot of the book is around these intergenerational, tight-knit relationships.
I feel like I’m mostly naming nonfiction and fiction, but another really, really good book that I read more recently was Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic. That was really beautiful. It is three nonfiction vignettes by a journalist, George Whitmore, who had written narrative journalism profiles for the New York Times on people living with AIDS. He was actually diagnosed while he was working on this, and he died a year after the book was published in 1988. They’re very moving vignettes, and it’s also really interesting to read because the knowledge and the terminology is so, so different. Even just from 1985 to 1995, it’s so drastically different. So you can imagine now being 2026, it was very moving.
There’s so many books that influenced DEAD BOYS IN SPACE. I love Ursula Le Guin also. I don’t know. There’s so many people. There’s so many people.
KB: Love a book with a lot of influences!
SYG: Yeah, I had to be brave about keeping the notes section not too long.
KB: I mean, I personally love a notes section.
SYG: Yeah, I do too.
KB: It feels like showing your work. I wish more poets did it. I want to know about the obsessions that drive you.
I want to ask a question about ordering. Ordering is one of my special interests in poetry collections. You have the chronology of your life with a memoir (which not everybody adheres to, but I think it’s expected). And then you have the narrative expectation of a fiction book. But a poetry collection is a different type of expectation, and thus a different way to guide the reader through the book. A section that I was especially interested in is the fourth section, which to me (I could be wrong), ties together the work of the last three sections. I’d love to know what went into ordering this section.
SYG: I’m glad you asked me about ordering, because that was by far the most challenging part of the manuscript. It went through, like, one million iterations. My editor was extremely dissatisfied with the original manuscript’s ordering, and the second and third version. I’m really glad that she was dissatisfied and pushed me to really think about how I was balancing different themes.
With the ordering, it was key that I took out quite a few poems that I really liked and that I thought really worked in the manuscript thematically, but did not work with the arc. I hoped that the last section [would bring] a satisfaction, open-endedness, and hopefulness that the other sections don’t bring. I think section one feels grief-oriented. Section two feels anger-oriented. The third section feels world-building, sci-fi, alternative history, thesis-y. And then the fourth section, I think, really offers something very different and is a departure. In the fourth section, I bring together the brother and sister, and they have a conversation — sort of psychic, spiritual, speculative conversation. That felt important to bring in, and it was tricky to set up.
It also felt important to consummate the queer desire that the speaker felt for the Salomé character, who very much represented that rage and that anger and that hurt. The speaker and Salomé arc resolves and they experience joy on this dance floor. The dance, the joy, the consummation of their sexual desire was also the place where these different generations of queer people, even the ghosts, can reunite too.
KB: Thank you for indulging in my personal interest question.
It strikes me that Salomé is the actual name of your wife. So though the book is not autobiographical, would you say it’s auto-fictional? Would you embrace that?
Auto-fiction is such an interesting genre to me, ‘cause it’s like, “The self is here. This character that I have invented is here. I’m trying to purport, to the reader, a distance.” So talk a little bit about your process of distancing these characters (especially the speaker and Salomé) from your own life.
SYG: When I met my wife Salomé, I hadn’t been familiar with the biblical story of Salomé — who also is featured in the Oscar Wilde play Salomé. She’s very famous for the Dance of the Seven Veils. She represents a feminine rage, or a femme fatale, or a woman’s revenge. I was really interested in that story, and how it was so flat and restrictive to me in both the Bible and the play.
Personally and in DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, I’m also really interested in the story of Lot’s wife. During the destruction of Sodom, she feels such compassion and kinship with the people who are being killed — which are probably gay people — that she looks back and she turns into a pillar of salt. I knew that I was interested in these two biblical women. I also just had a really strong association with Lot’s wife because my super religious aunt would read me that story every night before bed [Laughs]. [I was interested in] Lot’s wife’s suffering for looking back, for her compassion, and then also this recasting of Salomé as this vixen when I saw her as angry and very justified in the violence she commits.
I was interested in Salomé the character and obviously interested in my wife. I kept running them through my head and through different pieces. One of the hardest parts was allowing there to be a thread of the Salomé character without eclipsing the other parts of the story or muddying the waters between character and person too much. I ended up taking quite a few Salomé poems out. I was recasting my character Salomé as a butch lesbian. And of course my wife Salomé is also a butch lesbian. There’s the muddiness of the manuscript, there’s the muddiness interpersonally.
Part of that was amended by realizing that the manuscript just couldn’t hold everything. I was able to take some poems out. I also showed my wife the manuscript, took out certain things, and added other things. I asked, “How much do I want to be known, and how much privacy do I need? Where can I make this fictitious when it’s better for what I want to accomplish?” I think as I get older I’m like, “Wow, privacy is really the most amazing thing ever.”
It was a bit of a dance, you know? I feel very lucky that the story spoke to me so strongly, and that my editor helped me find the balance, and that also my wife was down for lending me her name, which was very generous and brave.
KB: Love that. I hope the Salomé poems still find a home. Maybe it’s a whole separate manuscript. And I personally love when I read somebody’s work and I’m like, “Oh, I saw you thinking about this in this book, and now you fully realized it in this book.” I always bring up, [as an example], the poem “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” that was in Ocean Vuong’s poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, and then we got a whole novel with the same name. It might be a nice golden nugget for people who have read the first thing.
Anyway, I won’t give you homework. I’d love to know what you are working on these days. I know it’s a question that authors don’t like, but I still feel like it’s a question worth asking ‘cause it gets people excited about your next thing.
SYG: (laughs) Thank you. I’m working on a speculative fiction novel. I’m super excited about it. I’m close to being done with a draft, which is cool. I’ve never written a novel before. There’s a lot of similar themes. Queerness, a lot of climate stuff, a lot of reproductive rights stuff. I love a good journey, walking-road kind of book, and that’s very much what it is.
I also feel like, “cool if something happens, great if nothing happens,” you know? I’m in that sweet spot where I’m working on a really fun project, but it doesn’t yet feel like I have to now transform it for the public or for an editor or an agent. I’m still in that process where I’m just having a lot of fun on the page.
KB: That’s totally the funnest part of the writing thing: being excited to be writing.
SYG: Exactly.
Sara Youngblood Gregory is an award-winning lesbian journalist, editor, and author. She is the author of the speculative poetry collection DEAD BOYS IN SPACE (YesYes Books, May 2026.) She writes about power, identity, health, and culture. Sara is currently a Contributing Writer and Editing Fellow for Yes! Magazine, covering LGBTQ equity, politics, and culture. Formerly, she was a wellness staff writer for PS. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, the New Republic, Vice, New York magazine, Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan, The Guardian, them and many others.