Local Woman [Paperback]

WINNER of the 2026 Publishing Triangle Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
FINALIST for the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry

A pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood.

Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

LTjzl jmz(FKA Jayy Dodd) beamed down in Los Angeles ’92 and is reuploading herself to the internet. She is the author of Mannish Tongues (2017) andThe Black Condition ft. Narcissus(Nightboat Books, 2019). She edited Bettering American Poetry Vol. 2 (2017) and A Portrait in Blues (2019). She has been a Lambda Literary Fellow, a Precipice Art Grant Recipient through Portland’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and Artist-in-Residence at Ori Gallery, and her film and performance works have been installed & screened across the country. She lives in Portland, Oregon."At the root of these emotionally searing and formally imaginative poems—at times irreverent, at times subversively poised—I recognize and affirm the most human of desires: to be accounted for by the world into which you were born, to see and be seen, to love and be loved. Jzl Jmz’s is a vital voice, to which I hope everyone will listen, and Local Woman a triumphant book I hope everyone will read."
—Charif Shanahan

"[Local Woman] is an incredible book, it is moving, it is instructive, it is radical in all the best ways, and it’l#(