Books

Don't make me do something we'll both regret
story collection

The stories in "Don't Make Me Do Something We'll Both Regret" are linked by their exploration of queer evil. The mystery of desire and sting of rejection drive a child to violence. Boys enter the forest, naive to what lurks within. A pack of pop stars-turned-lovers strike a terrible bargain to preserve their youth. Its characters are gnostics and mystics, ogres and queens whose defiance of the normative both liberates and confines.

Status: Forthcoming, June 2022, Texas Review Press Innovative Prose Series

”This book is a confrontation. It makes direct eye contact, and then there's no looking away. I laughed so much, with joy and wonder and fear. God, I loved every bit of it."
—Jac Jemc, author of Total Work of Art and False Bingo

"If Edgar Allan Poe and Dennis Cooper had a child who wrote fanfiction about boy bands, teen dramas, and memes, they’d write something like
Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret. Subversive, outrageous, and smart—Tim Jones-Yelvington is one of the most exciting writers working today."
—Eric Nguyen, author of Things We Lost to the Water

“This collection is as uncategorizable as the forms of queer evil that haunt it. Apocrypha for teen pop stars, meet cutes for phantoms-next-door, desires that once uttered, reshape the world: Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret is a glitter ball only Tim Jones-Yelvington can spin. The voice of this book will never leave you.”
—Daniel Allen Cox, author of Mouthquake

Press/Reviews:
Podcast Interview w/ Lindsay Hunter & Alex Higley on I’m A Writer But

Interview with Megan Milks, Grimoire

Reviewed by Patrick Reardon for Third Coast Review

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Strike a Prose: Memoirs of a Lit DIVA extraordinaire
co•im•press

  • Runner Up, 1913 Prize for First Books

  • Finalist, FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest

  • Finalist, Noemi Press Book Award for Prose

Who, or what is TJY? In this neon-lit chronicle of the rise and fall of literature's first pop star, the diva's trauma memoir collides with the twisted coming of age narrative of his adolescent fanboy, ornamented by the gilded prose poems that constitute the diva's song. The result is a queer exploitation, rather than obliteration, of whatever remains of the distinction between high theory and lowbrow culture, conjuring a space where Lady Gaga meets Valley of the Dolls meets Dennis Cooper meets Deleuze, set to a soundtrack by LaToya Jackson, and where camp's gestural pathos is tugged joyfully into the digital age.

"It's totally time for TJY—a pop star who is also a literary theorist."
—Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

"In much the same way that literally millions of people claim they were at Woodstock, or that tens of thousands will tell you they saw the last Sex Pistols show at Winterland, people will one day tell such untruths about their presence when Tim Jones-Yelvington debuted his LIT DIVA EXTRAORDINAIRE persona. And I am telling you right now: I was there, and now I am Tim Jones-Yelvingtoning down the Sequined Way. You should join me. Better late than never."
—Martin Seay, author of The Mirror Thief

"In Strike a Prose, the prismatic voice/voices/personas/identities of TJY simultaneously reveal and occlude, self-praise and self-deprecate, are joyful and bitchy and vulnerable and demanding. It's like taking a glittery walk in consciousness/memory/fantasy, and it's so good." 
—Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, author of Beast Meridian

"Strike a Prose smartly, hilariously reimagines the kunstlerroman as a (lit) celebrity memoir. The result is preposterous, provocative, and affirming!"
—M. Milks, author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories

Reviews:
”A kaleidoscope of cultural tropes and myths of queer identity—ranging from abuse narratives to Instagram influencers, from bildungsroman to perfume ads—Strike a Prose gleefully scatters both the glitter and litter of LGBTQ psychic residue.”
—Meghan Lamb, Fanzine (read full review)

”In keeping with the inherent element of camp, there is a kind of double consciousness, an awareness of the phenomenon from inside and out, which, here, fuels an ambivalence about the celebrity culture and its mechanisms. Jones-Yelvington celebrates the world-changing power of sequins while recognizing that the world requires changing.”
—Spencer Dew, decomP (read full review)

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BOOK TRAILER


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Colton Behavioral Therapy (Poetry chapbook)
Gazing Grain Press

Winner of the Gazing Grain 2017 Chapbook Contest.

Judge Camille Rankine on Colton Behavioral Therapy:
"Colton Behavioral Therapy adopts the structure of cognitive behavioral therapy to form its poetry. We move through each moment step by step—'Activating Event: Something Happens;' 'Belief: I Tell Myself;' 'Consequence: I Feel Something'—as we unfold and unpack the anxieties of existing within an imperfect body. Actor/model/singer/heartthrob/teen-wolf Colton Hayes stands in as the obscure object of desire, porcelain paragon of masculine beauty against which the speaker measures himself again and again. Within this frame, Tim-Jones Yelvington interrogates the very notion of beauty, its construction within a white supremacist world, and the how the cages our culture has built of it can hold us captive within our own minds. The speaker turns his gaze inward as the poems struggle through shame, fear, and doubt toward a playful and redemptive sense of love."

TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE: Use CONTACT FORM to purchase directly from author.

Interview with Gazing Grain Press


This is a Dance Movie! (Stories)
Tiny Hardcore Press/Civil Coping Mechanisms

  • Electric Literature’s 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2017

"This is the short story collection as playful dance party among serious things--a remix of pop culture, gay sex and celebrity, ranging from the confectionary to the visionary. A collection of sparks for various fires, from a bold young talent finding his way forward."
—Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night

"Beautifully written in perfectly realized sentences, with dead-on moments of recognition that require the reader to pause and savor the pleasure of rereading, these stories are brilliantly original, sexually frank, even a bit frightening perhaps, but very funny. Surreally, subversively, wonderfully funny."
—Susan Nussbaum, author of Good Kings, Bad Kings

"Tim Jones-Yelvington's 'This is a Dance Movie!' feels like a wound your dear childhood friend begged you to look at, and when you peered in it oozed glitter. This collection leans in, familiar, knowable, and then it dazzles you, leaving you blinking, waiting impatiently for when you can see again to read more."
—Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls

Reviews/Press:
The Nervous Breakdown Self-Interview
decomP (review)
Lambda Literary

OUT OF PRINT: Use CONTACT FORM to purchase directly from author.


Become on Yr Face (poetry chapbook)
New Michigan press

Winner of DIAGRAM's 2016 chapbook contest, these poems' feral forms manifest fantasies of queer becoming—from supermodel to ballerina, sex bot to insect, shedding chitin, glamour and goo. 

"When I think about contemporary poetry and its impossible donut shape—by which I mean continuous, obscure, dazzling, interesting, retreating, arriving—I always think about Tim Jones-Yelvington."
—Joyelle McSweeney

"Tim Jones-Yelvington is a glittery moonbeam from my favorite planet, Jupiter."
—Jennifer Tamayo

PURCHASE


Evan's House and the Other Boys Who Live There
(short fiction chapbook), in They Could No Longer
Contain Themselves, 
Rose Metal Press, 2011. 

"The collection’s most palpable sense of want, of stifled desire, of lightning-quick loneliness lives under the roof of Tim Jones-Yelvington’s 'Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There.'"

—Amy Kates, flashfiction.net

This collection contains—but just barely—five chapbooks of flash fiction, including the winner of the third annual Rose Metal Press short short chapbook contest, and four of the finalists from the fourth. Dominatrixes and fetishists, face paint and goo, fierce parental love and perverse longings cohabitate in Tim's contribution—"Evan's House and the Other Boys who Live There." 

Reviews:
Lambda Literary
Flashfiction.net
Small Press Book Review

PURCHASE


Daniel, Damned (Prose chapbook)
sold out, Solar Luxuriance Press

A tale of two boys who enter the woods, called forth by their juvenile longing, and by the spells of the queer witch queen who craves their candy.

From the Publisher:
Daniel, Damned takes as its launching point the epicenter of disposable celebrity--the teenager who found himself at the locus of America's attention for fifteen minutes, the titular "Daniel" of the "Damn, Daniel" vine. But this is just a launching point for Jones-Yelvington's playful exploration of desire. The narrative takes place in a dark forest, but the play takes place in language as we move through a twisted fairy tale that no one but Jones-Yelvington himself could create.

Reviews:
decomP
Real Pants

Read the PDF.


projects

EPHRAIM DOTEY, GODDESS OF LOVE
YOUNG ADULT NOVEL

Ephraim Dotey is head-over-heels in love with a boy named Aidan — Or he used to be, before he realized love’s nothing more than an elaborate marketing gimmick. (That's totally what he believes now). Now he’d be home free if he could just stop fantasizing about Aidan — even if most of those fantasies involve murdering him and his hot new boyfriend Perry, along with their henchwoman, his ex-best friend Beth. Then Ephraim receives a mysterious late-night visit from his favorite soap opera villainess, who informs him he’s possessed by the spirit of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love. Now, he's using his newfound powers as an excuse to become the first-class schemer he's always dreamed of being, wreaking havoc on his friends, family and high school, and learning love, actual love, doesn’t look like anything he’d ever imagined. 

Status: Complete draft, revising 


(Selected) prose

Short

Figures Up Ahead, Moving In the Trees, Always Crashing
The brother he’s always wanted isn’t what he craves.

Divine Decree, Signal Mountain Review
An evil preteen queen seizes power.

Cathedral Ceilings, Bosie
A homicidal queer assault on Ray Carver’s “Cathedral.”

The Phantom Voice, Yes Femmes
The classic queer impresario of the opera’s bowels, recast as Trump-era spin doctor. 

Meet #AlexFromTarget: An American Boy, Grimoire
The tragic tale of a 21st century meme, presented in the form of a novel about an early 20th century doll.

This is a Dance Movie, Another Chicago Magazine (originally)
Republished at The Nervous Breakdown—an ebullient paean to adolescence, endorphins, and mass-mediated desire. 

Limelight MemoriesSPECS journal of art and culture
Camp cinema meets boarding school sexual assault scandal meets One Direction "m-preg" fan fic. CW: Rape, infanticide.

Abraham the Daddy, Isaac the BoyThe Account
A queer gnostic gospel. 

Teenagers' NeedThe Fanzine
Aging, queer desire, unrequited adolescent longing, and the spectral body of Degrassi Community School's Student Body President.

Tim Jones-Yelvington is a Pretty Little Liar, Red Lightbulbs
Poetic interrogation of queer misogyny via the faggot gurlesque, inspired by my favorite teen melodrama:
"I am the secret keeper. I am keeping my knowledge of your evil. I am the evil little cunty little twat who tweets."

Derrick Mickelson's Cuddle Bed For Wayward BoysHarpur Palate (originally)
Audio, performed by professional Chicago actors, c/o "Reading Out Loud." I once described this as the only true (i.e. conventional/realist) short story I've ever written.

Law and Order: Viewers Like UsFRiGG
Spectatorship, loneliness, perversion, explored in the form of an internet episode guide for an imagined television series about watching TV. 

Seducing Matt Mitcham, Annalemma and Seducing Adam Lambert, Storyglossia
A pair of stories voiced by a precocious blogger/starfucker and self-professed "researcher." 

Everyday ZoologyKeyhole (originally)
A young mother, and the uncanny horror of urban domesticity and strange, imaginary animals. 

Very Short

TeethMatter Press Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
His smile perched on a rock. I had ideas for where to put those teeth...

Clean Babies, htmlgiant
While we fucked, I'd hold his baby...

Fugitives, [PANK]
Sliced meat glittered on plates, luminous, white and threatening...

What if the Dungeon ClosesSmokelong Quarterly
Marlena was a professional dom. She was always telling me how much less exploited she felt than when she’d worked as an administrative assistant...

Painted FacesKeyhole (originally)
I want to dig my fingers into the paint and spread yellow whiskers across my cheeks...

American KidsMud Luscious (originally)
Bristol likes Levi to fuck her with his hockey mask on, behind a tree in the church courtyard...


Poetry

ZOMG…Boys! Boys! Boys!, Dream Pop

Prism Buttock...Refract Yr Splurge, Dreginald

Terminal Ballerina, Enclave

Visage, Jet Fuel Review

Evening Out, Finery